Penn Live Arts presents Limón Dance Company, with works by José Limón, Doris Humphrey, and Kayla Farrish

Two Ecstatic Themes

Humphrey’s 1931 short solo work, Two Ecstatic Themes, opened the evening with a richly emotional performance by Mariah Gravelin in a long white dress with tight sleeves and a wide, flowing skirt (the original 1931 design by Pauline Lawrence). We mostly think about dance as a sequence of steps, but in this piece, Humphrey focused on the rise and fall of the arms, the natural curve of the body. In the first Theme, set to Nikolai Karlovich Medtner’s Tragedy Fragments on piano, Gravelin was hypnotic as she swayed, her arms held out at her sides, then rounded as if she cradled the moon, her back in a sweeping arch to the side.

In the second Theme, composer Gian Francesco Malipiero’s Maschere che passano set a driving pace for the more forceful rise and fall. Gravelin clenched her arms tight, then dropped to her wide-spread knees in a backbend that brushed the stage with her shoulders. Liz Schweitzer’s lighting design, a pale wash of side lights, brought out the pearlescence in the dress, giving the piece an otherworldly feel that was mesmerizing.

A Traitor in our midst

Limón’s The Traitor, created in 1955, tells the biblical story of the Last Supper with MJ Edwards as the Leader and Nicholas Ruscica as the Traitor. The piece was originally set on eight male dancers, but the cast is now all genders. Similarly, the original elaborate costumes would have looked out of place today, but costume designer Barbara Erin Delo’s rough loose pants in faded colors and mesh tops gave the piece a timeless sensibility.

The curtain opened on a series of arches, like an agora or a town square, that crossed the stage on a diagonal, and Gunther Schuller’s Symphony for Brass and Percussion set an abrupt, ominous tone. The dancers entered, suspicious and challenging. They circle each other, in pairs or as a group, aggressive with knees raised high. Edwards appeared on the bent back of a dancer, carried like a cross with their arms outstretched. As the leader, Edwards is exalted by their followers, who lift them on their shoulders to step down again on the backs of a descending rank of dancers.

A cloth held taut by the apostles represents the Last Supper, with Edwards at its head, and later, the cloth wrapped Edwards as a robe. Ruscica as the Traitor seemed always on the outside, reaching for something he ultimately betrayed with a kiss that was more desperate regret than cynical betrayal. The piece ends with his suicide by hanging.

Limón created The Traitor at the height of the McCarthy hearings, where friends and lovers betrayed each other to escape the destruction of their own lives, and we see in the Traitor the love he feels for the Leader, and the terrible pressure to betray the very thing one loves. The message resonated almost too deeply, and it was hard not to think of families torn apart by the politics of our own day.

A drum and a quake

The second half of the evening brought another Limón piece with a decided change of pace. Scherzo was all play, centered around the sort of drum you would see in a parade. Kieran King led the fun, banging the drum to a percussion soundscape by Hazel Johnson. The four dancers, in loose white pants by Lawrence, leapt and circled the drum, the rhythmic percussion driving the dance. When the music stopped, the dancers carried the rhythm themselves, clapping their hands or beating the drum in turn. They circled and tossed it in the air, leaping and swooping with grins on their faces. The fall and recovery of Limón’s technique means you are never down for long. It was impossible not to join them in the joy.

Kayla Farrish brought the night to a close with a new piece, The Quake that Held Them All, inspired by two of Limón’s lost works created in Mexico. Set to the jazzy percussive score created for the piece by Alex MacKinnon, The Quake uses similar fall and recovery techniques, with skips and small leaps, and vocalized breaths, but with the faster pace of much of contemporary work. It tied the evening together, showing that the history of modern dance lives on in the works of the early masters, and in the bodies of the dancers and choreographers that follow in their footsteps.