Limon Dance Company
Sometimes a dance seems blurred, as if someone had rubbed Vaseline on a glass wall built into the proscenium arch. The movement is missing something. In two of the pieces on the Limon Dance Company program, what was missing was the specific technique for the dance showcased. The dancers went through their assigned motions; but without the special quality that training instills, the works just seemed fuzzy.
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Because Ralph Lemon is a contemporary choreographer whose work I’ve seen, it’s easier to pinpoint the missing technique. The dancers in Lemon’s former company–he recently disbanded it–were trained in release technique, a method dating from the 1960s and taught most prominently at the Center for Movement Research in New York. A dancer trained in release technique is taught to let go of muscular tension, to dance with the skeleton rather than the muscles. This kind of dancer can be noodly, so relaxed that he or she seems passive. But Lemon learned how to make dances that show these dancers’ best side: their legs seem to float to the ceiling without any effort, and they’re so completely relaxed in their turns that they look like windmills, as a turning arm passes momentum to a turning leg, which passes momentum on to the torso or head. In a series of dances for his company, particularly Their Eyes Rolled Back in Ecstasy, Lemon turned the technique’s passivity into a spiritual statement of acceptance and Shaker-like simplicity.
The most successful work is made up of excerpts from Limon’s 1964 A Choreographic Offering, based on movements from several Doris Humphrey dances. A genteel piece that wouldn’t look out of place as the balletic interlude of an opera, it’s filled with precisely placed arms and precise foot patterns, such as arms held in a circle over a dancer’s head as her torso bends to the side, or a tiny half step as a grace note before a more propulsive step. The dance’s main emotion is restraint and decorum; it calls for precise dancing and noble feeling and receives both in abundance from the Limon dancers. The gentle, clean shapes from Humphrey’s choreography are soothing and graceful.
