DANCES FOR A CENTURY: HISTORIC AND CONTEMPORARY DANCES 1906-1990
The transitory nature of dance always magnifies the problems of reconstructing past works. Even the advent of film did not necessarily make the recording process more reliable: stored cans of film sometimes exploded suddenly and at random. Later film documentation and video are also inadequate: a close-up of a dancer’s face, for instance, obscures what the rest of the body is doing. Labanotation has its flaws, too: it isn’t sensitive enough to account for nuances of interpretation, and certainly can’t cover the stylistic changes a choreographer might make over the years, as Balanchine did. And translating its abstract symbols into movement is even more complex than translating texts from one language into another.
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Like Graham, Humphrey created not just a repertory of dances but a revolutionary new dance technique. Humphrey’s theory of fall and recovery, like Graham’s contraction and release, provided a vibrant movement vocabulary that’s both lyrical and dramatic. Although the Academy of Movement and Music students who make up the bulk of Momenta haven’t yet mastered this difficult technique, they can still offer us some fascinating glimpses of Humphrey’s repertoire, particularly her early dances. They also perform the early works of Ruth Saint Denis, whose company and school, Denishawn, profoundly inspired and influenced Humphrey, though eventually Humphrey and fellow dancer Charles Weidman found it necessary to break away from Saint Denis’s overpowering presence.
Under the Leaves was intended to review the many positions and movements in the Denishawn repertoire. As in Water Study, the dancers are crouched over, shifting positions as they extend a leg back and out or their hands forward. But these dancers go through their paces with a smooth lyricism to the music of Thome, moving through some straightforward progressions that lead them first to a kneeling position, then to a series of standing and floor balletic positions, and back again to the crouch.
Saint Denis’s dances were often mere excuses for dancers to pose in pretty costumes, thrilling the audience. (These romanticized snippets of foreign cultures, brief as they were, served nonetheless to introduce a generation of Americans to the different customs, dress, and characteristic movements of various cultures–and can serve the same purpose today.) Saint Denis isolated the essentials of a costume and pared props to a minimum, and taught Humphrey to do the same, as in her celebrated Hoop Dance and her first solo, Scarf Dance (performed here under its more formal appellation, Valse Caprice, by Laura Gallardo-Brand). One dancer waving a pink scarf focuses our attention on the movement better than four dancers trailing scarves, as in Saint Denis’s art deco Minute Waltz (1916). Valse Caprice does show, however, the influence of Saint Denis’s Orientalia, in which a profusion of banners, scarves, and veils were waved or trailed in the air exotically. Humphrey often reproduced that motion in her choreography, producing a less decorative, more integrated effect.
