Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey: The Creative Impulse of Reconstruction by Lesley Main (review)

Who was Doris Humphrey? And what was her work? We could ask these questions about any figure in dance. The search for definitive answers would be clotted with interventions and interpretations, hearsay and deliberate refocusing. A new dance work inextricably combines concept with performance, but there’s no foolproof way of preserving the entity composed of that created object and the performers who brought it into being. In the other arts, reliable documents can be consulted: a written text, a musical score, a recording of the original performance. That history can be taken for granted and left alone—or it can be used to create new histories of up-to-date interest. In dance, textual verifications either do not exist or have inherent shortcomings that alter the work. All dance performance works change over time, along with our understanding of crucial meta-definers like meaning, quality, and style. So it is tricky to assume that we know a dance, even one we have seen.

Lesley Main, who has undertaken the rehabilitation of Doris Humphrey in the UK, gained her perception of the choreographer from her teacher, Ernestine Stodelle. At the beginning of her book, The Dance Technique of Doris Humphrey and Its Creative Potential, Stodelle quotes her mentor: “I always thought students should learn principles of movement and be encouraged to expand or embroider on those in their own way” (Stodelle 1978, vii–viii). This remark, taken with Stodelle’s title, pigeonholes Humphrey as a teacher, not an eminent choreographer. When I looked at my own copy of The Art of Making Dances, I found I had underlined the same words, plus the sentence that precedes them in Humphrey’s introductory chapter: “I never believed in teaching with a set vocabulary of movements, hardened into technical sequences” (Humphrey 1959, 19). Humphrey assumed that these words would fall on fertile ground, given what she foresaw as “the astonishing spread of the modern dance through the educational system.” Her book is matter-of-fact—a teaching manual for dance composition students. She hoped it would contribute to a developing theory of choreography, but not, I think, to the erasure of her own choreographic accomplishment.

There is no urtext for any of Humphrey’s early dances, except for a few primitive films. Her unfinished autobiography, published first in 1966 by Selma Jeanne Cohen’s Dance Perspectives and completed by Cohen, ends in 1928 when Humphrey, Pauline Lawrence, and Charles Weidman departed from Denishawn and began making independent work. All the Labanotation scores were made late in Humphrey’s life or after her life, when second thoughts and generational slippage had occurred. Aside from scattered references to moments in Humphrey–Weidman’s and Limón’s dances that illustrate her theory, The Art doesn’t tell you how she choreographed anything, or what any of these dances should look like in its entirety.

After Humphrey’s death in 1958, professional productions of her dances became rare. I first saw a few of them done by the José Limón company in the early 1960s, but today you’d have to do some digging to find one. Re-reading Humprey’s book, dance academics of the 1980s perceived Humphrey as dictatorial, a stern formalist, despite her many offbeat opinions. When her dances are performed now, they usually represent the earliest, experimental works, which grew from simple movement motifs and ideas into dance metaphors.

Ernestine Stodelle danced with Humphrey in the early years (1929–1935), and she viewed the first investigations as underlying the evolution of Humphrey’s later choreography. As a stalwart in the missionary work of inventing modern dance, Stodelle saw her mentor in romantic terms. She retrieved several early Humphrey dances, imprinting them with her own lyrical movement qualities. To me, Humphrey’s romanticism was made of sterner stuff: her optimism, her confidence in...