Doris Humphrey Overview

"A movement without motivation is unthinkable," Doris Humphrey wrote in "The Art of Making Dances," and she lived this statement out in her life, career, and dances. At a time when many dance artists were still acting out a balletic obsession... [more]

"A movement without motivation is unthinkable," Doris Humphrey wrote in "The Art of Making Dances," and she lived this statement out in her life, career, and dances. At a time when many dance artists were still acting out a balletic obsession with the presentation of limbs, Humphrey cultivated a deep relationship with gravity, understanding it as the universal motivating force on the body. The kinetic idea of "fall and recovery" was Humphrey's major technical discovery. She called life and dance the "arc between two deaths" -- by "two deaths," she meant the stillness before and after any act of motion. What interested Humphrey most was not visual presentation, but the body in a state of transition, the act of falling, the urgency of the arc. Her dances moved deliberately through time and space, creating a rhythm that superseded visual effect. Humphrey's dances used the floor as a powerful propellant for upward motion. "Fall and recovery" applied directly to Doris Humphrey, as well; throughout her career and life she demonstrated rubbery resilience and an Emersonian self-reliance. When her father's hotel fell upon hard times, the 18-year-old Doris left her first tour to support the family by teaching dance. And Humphrey pulled her own dance company (established in 1928) through the Great Depression with the determination of a prairie pioneer. A proud tenth-generation American, Humphrey saw Modern dance as a unique product of her country. In fact, she saw herself as a maverick wrenching movement out of gravity just as the pioneers had carved a livable space out of the wild landscape: the floor as earth. After ten years as a dancer with Denishawn (the dance company of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, purveyors of all dances exotic and foreign), Humphrey split, tired of her mentors' constant need to borrow movement from other countries and to present it as showy spectacle. Humphrey found her own way to glory in the grand, visual potential of form. She used a huge cast of 44 in "With My Red Fires" to create waves of moving bodies, and explored the frieze-like processional of a Cretan ritual in "Dionysiaques." Humphrey was one of the first choreographers to make the bold move away from musical accompaniment, seeing the body's reaction in solely kinetic terms for "Water Study" and "the Drama of Motion." As her own company evolved, Humphrey began to see herself as an evangelist. She likened touring to missionary activity and cast herself as a religious leader more than once. (She was well-versed in Nietzsche and perhaps acted out his belief in a "god who dances.") On early tours she experienced some religious prejudice against dance, which made her all the more adamant about spreading the "word." Her rather yogic philosophy loomed large on the wall of her school for all to read. It commanded students "to find a perfect union between the inner thought and outer form -- to draw from this a radiance and power that makes of life a more glorious and vital experience." The "radiance" of the mind/body union was for the benefit of all of life, not just the perfection of art. [show less]