Jose Limon: An Unfinished Memoir

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Jose Limon: An Unfinished Memoir Overview

Both as a dancer and a choreographer, Jose Limon electrified audiences from the1930s to the 1960s. With his striking looks and charismatic presence, he was American modern dance's first male star. Born in Culiacan, Mexico, in 1908, the eldest of twelve children, he came to the United States when he was seven. In 1928, after a year at UCLA as an art major, he left for New York. Here, he attended his first modern dance concert and discovered his destiny.

He spent the 1930s with the Humphrey-Weidman group. Then, in the 1940s, after a stint in the army, and with Doris Humphrey as artistic advisor, he formed one of the outstanding modern dance companies of the postwar era. His greatest works -- The Moor's Pavane, La Malinche, The Traitor, A Choreographic Offering, There is a Time, Missa Brevis -- extolled a humanism that endeared them to audiences the world over. Although Limon died in 1972, all these dances remain in the Limón Dance Company's active repertory.

This memoir was commissioned by Wesleyan University Press in the late 1960s. Left unfinished at the time of Limon's death, it stands on its own as a Joycean account of the coming of age of an unusually perceptive dance artist. Limon writes with eloquence of his Mexican childhood. And of the numerous figures he memorializes, from Martha Graham to Jose Covarrubias, none is more luminously evoked than Doris Humphrey, the "goddess," "nymph," and "caryatid" of his life. Sensitively edited by Lynn Garafola, the book includes a complete list of Limón's works, richly informative notes, rare photographs, and a detailed bibliography. This is the single most important book on Limón and a riveting memoir of modern dance during its golden age

Jose Limon: An Unfinished Memoir Specifications

I believe that we are never more truly and profoundly human than when we dance. --José Limón

Though he lived to be 64, it's always seemed that dancer-choreographer José Limón (1908-1972) was snatched from this earth prematurely. For that reason, the appearance of Limón's unfinished biography--which has the same assured, sensitive quality as his dances--is such a treasure.

Limón's writings here tell of his childhood and early adult years. Born in Culiacán, Mexico, the eldest of 12 children, Limón showed great talent as a visual artist from early on. His family moved to the U.S. when he was 7 (first to Arizona, then California), where he attended Catholic school and continued his drawing and painting. It was not until the late '20s, when he moved to New York City to study art, that Limón saw his first dance concert and changed course entirely. "I knew with shocking suddenness that until then I had not been alive or, rather, that I had yet to be born," he writes. With a level of detail that belies his sense of miraculous discovery, he chronicles his work with and appreciation of such 20th-century choreographic masters as Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Martha Graham, and George Balanchine. The memoir ends just as Limón has formed his own company.

You couldn't ask for better stewardship for these papers, which had been viewable until now only at the dance collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The Society of Dance History Scholars, with Lynn Garafola acting as editor, drove this project. Carla Maxwell, the current artistic director of the José Limón Dance Company, wrote the foreword; and Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt penned the introduction. For a short time, at least, Limon lives again. --Jean Lenihan