Doris Humphrey: A Centennial Celebration - Gala Performances. - LaGuardia High School, New York, NY - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Feb, 1996 by Lynn Garafola

Doris Humphrey: A Centennial Celebration can only be regarded as a mixed opportunity. With its many lackluster performances and questionable artistic choices, it did little to confirm Humphrey's place in the history of modern dance. If anything, the two gala performances that made up the program conveyed the mistaken impression that her legacy consists of only a handful of works, not all of the highest caliber.

Humphrey's claim to historical importance rests on the monumental group dances she choreographed in the 1930s and the intimately scaled works she created after World War II. With Day on Earth, Night Spell, and Fantasy and Fugue on the program, the later period was well represented. The same cannot be said of the earlier one. Indeed, apart from the juvenilia Valse Caprice and Soaring, only one work, New Dance, choreographed by Humphrey in 1935, testified to her accomplishment prior to 1 947. Given that Passacaglia, The Shakers, and With My Red Fires all remain in repertoire, their absence from the program is as difficult to understand as the presence of Charles Weidman's Brahms Waltzes and Jose Limon's Symphony for Strings.

Of the half-dozen groups participating in the celebration, only the Utah-based Repertory Dance Theatre (in Fantasy and Fuque and Night Spell) and the Philadelphia-based Lisa Bardarson and Dancers (in Day on Earth) performed at a consistently professional level. Otherwise, the dancing was little better than amateur, not only in Brahms Waltzes (presented by Dance Consort: Mezzacappa-Gabrian with teenaged girls from Young Dancers in Repertory) and Soaring (danced by LaGuardia High School students), but also in Symphony for Strings, in which Clay Taliaferro struggled with choreography he is too old to perform and an overweight John Crawford literally spilled out of his trousers.

Self-indulgence was also evident in New Dance, performed by Deborah Carr's Theatre Dance Ensemble, where Carr herself, in a serious lapse of judgment, chose to appear in Humphrey's role. Although Carr may once have been up to the task, today she lacks the energy, definition, and presence needed to galvanize the work and give it dramatic focus.

This was especially unfortunate, as New Dance is potentially one of Humphrey's greatest works. Composed by Wallingford Riegger, the score is strongly rhythmic, at times as insistent as a machine, at others shot through with an edginess that belies the unnatural quiet of the surface. With unfaltering musicality, Humphrey catches these moods and rhythms; with an unfailing sense of space, she translates them into a thrilling architecture of blocks, horizontals wheeling troikas, and endlessly re-forming groups. Although the configurations were clear, the dancing itself was phlegmatic, conveying little sense of the choreography's underlying drama or emotion.

Humphrey's late works, by contrast, were marvelously danced. Set in the dark recesses of the psyche, Night Spell and Day on Earth are both intimate and intensely theatrical; they treat their subjects - seduction in the former, the death of a child in the latter - as imagined or relived events. Although the emotion is more overt than in New Dance, its expression is equally rooted in the interplay of shape and rhythm. Rightly, the Repertory Dance Theatre and the Bardarson dancers allowed both emotion and character to emerge directly from the movement.

The other late work brightened by the RDT dancers was Fantasy and Fugue, a small gem set to Mozart. Choreographed for six dancers, the piece has no story to tell, no grand vision to convey; it is simply about moving in time and space. Humphrey's mastery is everywhere - in the endless variety of configurations, the contrasting movements, the unexpected harmonies of shape, the absolute rightness of her musical response. Here, as in other works, she reveals the sensibility and temperament of a classicist.

Even if Ray Cook, the artistic director of this celebration, lacked the means to mount a full-scale tribute to Humphrey. he had the material to produce one solid program. Unfortunately, ambition got the better of good sense, resulting in a hodgepodge that ill served the dancers, the audience, and the artist it was intended to honor.

Humphrey was equally ill served (albeit for different reasons) by the 1995 International Doris Humphrey Centennial Celebration, directed by Mino Nicolas. Although the five programs embraced the whole of Humphrey's career and the dancing in general was better, the reconstructions themselves were sometimes suspect. In addition, communication with the press was extremely poor. As it proved impossible to get an advance schedule of offerings, I could only attend the second program.

This, as it happened, included the variations from New Dance in a staging (uncredited) performed by Jennifer Muller/The Works that made a muddle of Humphrey's rhythmic and spatial complexities. Equally unconvincing from a choreographic standpoint was the duet Rudepoema, given a strong erotic flavor in this re-creation by Nicolas and the late Eleanor King. More successful was With My Red Fires (presumably staged by Nicolas), in which Humphrey's astringent gesture and the architecture of her choric groupings (not always rendered with sufficient clarity) recalled Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces. Although Randi Meares as The Matriarch needed greater authority, her goading of Humphrey's scuttling masses suggested the madness of a fuhrer as much as the fury of a mother scorned - the usual interpretation. Here was food for thought; here, too, was something Humphrey probably even choreographed.