Fall and recovery: a tribute to Doris Humphrey - modern dance pioneer

Dance Magazine, Oct, 1995 by Jane Sherman

A century ago, Horace Buckingham Humphrey and his wife, Julia Wells Humphrey, announced to the world the birth of a daughter destined to become a new kind of artist in the country where her ancestors had lived for generations.

By the time Doris Humphrey was five, her father, a newspaperman, and her mother, a graduate of the Boston Conservatory of Music, had been reduced to earning a living by working as manager and housekeeper, respectively, of a seedy theatrical hotel. They nevertheless found the money to send the little girl with the dark red ringlets and violet-blue eyes to a private school. There Doris received a progressive education that included clogging, ballroom, and character dance. Julia enrolled her in ballet classes when, at age ten, she was chosen to be Titania in the school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In 1913 Horace lost his modest hotel job shortly after Doris graduated from high school. This forced Julia and eighteen-year-old Doris to realize that henceforth they must provide most of the family income. (This responsibility weighed heavily on Humphrey's creative aspirations for years; her father died in 1934 and her mother in 1945.) Julia Humphrey organized dance lessons for children and ballroom classes for adults. With herself at the piano and Doris as an inexperienced teacher, they opened a dance school that proved surprisingly successful. Welcome as it was, however, this very success meant that young Doris was trapped in a teaching routine for four important years of her life as a developing dancer. Only in 1917, when she was confident that the school's income would be sufficient for her parents' needs, did she decide that she could honorably leave Illinois to enter the Los Angeles Denishawn School.

There she found a new vision of dance and technique to inspire her classes when she returned to Oak Park. And there she also found Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn; to her intense joy, they urged her to become the performer she had always wanted to be instead of the pedagogue she feared she was doomed to remain. Thus began the twenty-two-year-old Humphrey's higher education under the guidance of those two originators, whose revolutionary theater-dance concerts and tours were creating an audience for the great American modem dance to come.

Almost as soon as Humphrey joined their company, St. Denis and Shawn gave her solos. More important, they encouraged her to choreograph as early as 1919. Valse Caprice was her first attempt. Then she cocreated with St. Denis the music visualizations Sonata Pathitique (Beethoven) and Soaring (Schumann), experiences that released her inherited musicality in group choreography.

Throughout the years of Denishawn tours of the Far East and the United States, Humphrey danced both in the company ensemble and as soloist, and also served as rehearsal mistress. During summer school, she was also Shawn's assistant teacher in Carnegie Hall's Studio 61 and elsewhere. By 1928, when she left St. Denis and Shawn to stand on her own two bare feet, she was weary and in disagreement with new Denishawn aims and policies. Although full of ideas for dances that she wanted to create, she knew that once again teaching would have to provide a financial foundation for her dreams.

With Charles Weidman and Pauline Lawrence, former members of Denishawn Dancers, and close friends, she opened a school in New York City; their pupils included many who had danced in the Denishawn student recital featuring Humphrey's earliest independent works. They were later joined by disgruntled Denishawn performers to form the first Humphrey-Weidman company.

Most of these fledgling members worked at tiring, prosaic jobs during the day in order to study and rehearse with Humphrey at night. She promised no one a self-supporting professional future--each dancer earned only ten dollars per appearance--yet so dedicated to her vision of dance were these young women that few defected at this harsh prospect. (Asked how Humphrey-Weidman company members were selected, Lawrence grimly joked in reply: "We throw them off the top of the Empire State Building, and if they bounce, we take them.")

On October 28, 1928, Humphrey and Weidman and their group presented a history-making concert that included Humphrey's Concerto in A Minor (to the Grieg work for piano and orchestra) for herself and fifteen dancers; her musicless Water Study for the ensemble of sixteen, a work that astounded critics and audiences alike with its synchronized, moving-wave forms, from calm lapping on a beach to a crashing tempest; and her Color Harmony for Weidman and sixteen dancers. which was hailed as the first truly abstract modern "ballet." (Humphrey defined abstract as "a drawing out and condensing of essences: not a generalization, but a truth particularized."

She had created these works of startlingly original choreography without having had time to develop her own basic physical and philosophical technique. After the concert's critical success, she knew that it was imperative that she do so if she were ever to attain her stated goal: "I wish my dance to reflect some experience of my own in relationship to the outside world: to be based on reality illumined by imagination: to be organic rather than synthetic."