Form as the Image of Human Perfectability and Natural Order

Abstract

In 1954, when I was dancing in Harriette Ann Gray's company, Doris Humphrey (with whom Harriette had danced in the 1930s) invited us to see a run-through of the reconstruction of With My Red Fires she had staged with Juilliard students. Karen Kanner was an astounding six-foot-tall Matriarch. I remember sitting in a cramped studio of International House feeling not as if I were watching dance, but as if I were surrounded by forces on the verge of slipping out of control. The following year, Day on Earth was presented on one of the mixed bills Bethsabée de Rothschild sponsored at the ANTA theater. I think I remember (could it have happened?) Day on Earth and Cave of the Heart back to back! José Limón, Letitia Ide, and Ruth Currier performed; I thought it was the best modern dance I had ever seen (although I hadn't seen much and vastly preferred doing to watching). Humphrey's Dawn in New York in 1956 galvanized me into auditioning for Juilliard Dance Theater—then a semi-professional company under Doris's direction, open to anyone. Accepted, I took Doris's composition course—her last, it would turn out. I had studied Modern Forms with Louis Horst, but I had also been taught to think of composing a dance in terms of locating a great emotional eruption within and running with it. Harriette Ann Gray had shown me the impulsive, ecstatic side of Humphrey-Weidman dancing and its potential for communicating feeling. Doris's guidelines for composing dances were refreshingly objective. I later came to see a slight rigidity in her viewpoint; much 1960s vanguardism would have fallen beyond her pale. At the time, I found it liberating.