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. LA MALINCHE The Inspiration for the Dance Shelley C. Berg The artist; disciple, abundant, multiple, restless. The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful, Maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind. The true artist draws out all from his heart. As a choreographer, José Limón was often most eloquent in creating compact dance-dramas with archetypal, mythic, or literary characters: The Moor’s Pavane, The Exiles, The Emperor Jones, and La Malinche. None is more powerful than the latter, the ballet created at the very start of Limon’s career, reconciling his artistic ambitions with his Mexican American heritage. Limón was born in 1908 in Culiacán, a city in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa. His father, Florencio, enjoyed local prestige as the conductor and director of the State Academy of Music.2 His mother, Francisca, came from a moderately well-off bourgeois family. Although his parents came from the same social class, their ethnic backgrounds differed, reflecting the dual identity he would perpetually struggle to reconcile: his European (Spanish and French) father and his mother with “a dash of Indian blood.” In respectable provincial Mexican society of the early 1900s, Limón notes, it was not considered “quite nice” to be “tainted with the blood of the wild tribes of the mountains or deserts, the peons enslaved in the gigantic haciendas or les plebes, the degraded or poverty-stricken rabble of the cities.”3 Hence his mother’s family did their best to disregard their Native American ancestry. The violence of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 affected Limón personally . In his abbreviated autobiography, An Unfinished Life, Limón described how as an eight-year-old child he witnessed the dramatic death of his young uncle, Manuel, shot in the head at the beginning of the battle of Cananea during what had started as a peaceful family breakfast.4 Even his childhood games reflected the military violence around him. He and his friends would collect and trade spent cartridges from the ongoing street battles to reenact the shooting as pretend federales, or La Malinche: The Inspiration for the Dance  government troops, and revolutionaries. As a choreographer, he would transform these memories and images into Danzas Mexicanas (1939). Despite the revolution raging around him, young Limón was able to observe ballroom dances, concerts, dramas, and zarzuelas because of his father’s position as director of the Academia de Música. Years later, he could recall the “electrifying pound of castanets, the magnetic intricacy of the steps and figurations, the verve of the taconeado [heel tapping ]” of the “glittering” Spanish dancers, as well as the elegant tango of a ballroom dance team.5 The young Limón was also enthralled with local bullfights, which he would later describe as the “most Spanish of dances.”6 With musical jobs increasingly scarce and his own position in jeopardy , Florencio Limón moved his family from Mexico to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles. The young Limón’s skills in painting and sketching became very apparent even while he was still attending the schools of Los Angeles, and this interest prompted him to move to New York City to pursue a career in painting following the death of his beloved mother. Not long after arriving in New York, however, Limón saw a performance by the German modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg that changed his life’s ambitions. He no longer wished to paint, he wanted to dance. Referred by two friends of Charles Weidman’s, Limón began to study at the Humphrey/Weidman studio, where he proved himself an apt and fervently committed pupil. Soon he joined the Humphrey-Weidman Dance Company and rapidly rose within its ranks. Limón performed many of the seminal works in the repertory, including Humphrey’s The Shakers (1931), New Dance (1935), and With My Red Fires (1936). Beginning in 1930, Limón began to create small-scale dances of his own, initially solos, duets, or trios with the Humphrey-Weidman dancers Eleanor King and Ernestine Henoch (later Stodelle). These early dances appear to have emphasized formal elements of dance composition . Seven years later Limón created his first full-length piece, the Danza de la Muerte (Dance of Death), inspired by the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. Limón was certainly not the only artist who supported the Republicans in Spain. As the dance historian Ellen Graff notes, the Spanish Civil War “triggered an avalanche of...

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