Limón Dance Company at The Joyce: Dances Lost and Found

At a recent open rehearsal for the Limón Dance Company’s upcoming performances at The Joyce Theater, artistic director Dante Puleio told Observer that he “wanted to zero in on José’s perspective as an outsider, and his belief in the power and the hope inside of community.” Puleio is the Company’s sixth artistic director since it was founded in 1946 by José Limón (1908-1972) and Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), and he takes great care to honor the founders’ legacy and repertory. He often refers to Limón’s memoir and personal journals and thinks deeply about how to connect the American Modern Dance pioneer’s life and work with contemporary audiences.

In the back of José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir is a list of all of Limón’s works. Puleio noticed one there—Scherzo—which he’d seen photographs of but knew little about. Something about it interested him enough that he went searching and found “this little gem hidden deep in the archives.” Together, Puleio and associate artistic director Logan Frances Kruger began researching and unearthed what will no doubt be a highlight of the Company’s seventy-eighth season.

Scherzo began as a class exercise—a study in movement and rhythm for Limón’s students at Juilliard. It was then developed into a light-hearted piece for the American Dance Festival and was first performed to a percussive score by Hazel Johnson in August of 1955. Puleio found a fuzzy black and white recording of this performance, as well as one from the Company’s former artistic director Carla Maxwell’s 1980 reconstruction. The piece was only ever performed a few times and has not been seen on stage in forty-five years.

The quartet, which Puleio described to Observer as “so much fun,” was exactly what he and his company and the season needed. It would lighten the mood “despite everything that’s happening in the world, and bring a little joy.” And though the choreography is technically quite difficult, he knew his current dancers were rhythmically strong and could pull it off. “The dancers have this playful, youthful energy about them that for me, this piece really inhabited. It was like four kids playing in the backyard, banging on a garbage can.”

The reconstruction process was joyful, too, and very collaborative. The entire cast helped Puleio and Kruger put the piece back together, watching the videos again and again, trying things out, and offering their suggestions. “It became what I imagine processes with José would have been like,” Puleio said.  He explained that Limón would often set the work he wanted to set but then ask the dancers for input “to give them the agency so the piece could live inside of them.” The cast spent a week together at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, “really saturated, just us doing this really cool project together. It was great bonding time.”

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Surrounding the reconstructed Scherzo is a diverse and thoughtfully curated lineup of dances. Opening the program is The Traitor (1954), Limón’s retelling of Gethsemane from Judas’s perspective. This piece for eight male dancers, set to a dramatic musical score by Gunther Schuller, was made in response to the McCarthy hearings and is regarded as one of Limón’s greatest works. This will be the first time The Traitor is being performed by a mixed-gender cast.

Scherzo is up next, followed by the World Premiere of Bessie award-winning choreographer Kayla Farrish’s The Quake That Held Them All (2024). The new ensemble work, commissioned by the Company, is a reimagining of two of Limón’s lost works—Redes (Nets) (1951) and El Grito (The Scream) (1952)—set to a propulsive musical score by Alex MacKinnon.

Next is Humphrey’s masterful solo, Two Ecstatic Themes (1931), here performed to live piano. The work is short, abstract and stunning. It explores contrasting movements: circular and pointed, soft and aggressive, descending and ascending.

Closing out the program is Limón’s masterwork Missa Brevis (1958). The piece was inspired by Limón’s trip to Poland after World War II. He witnessed the great devastation the war had caused there but was moved by how the people were rebuilding their towns and lives with hope for the future. The 2024 reconstruction features gender-neutral casting and an exposed, raw stage. It is set to a remastered recording of Zoltan Kodály’s “Missa Brevis en Tempore Belli” (“Short Mass in Time of War”), which was written during the Nazi occupation of Hungary and first performed in the cellar of a bombed-out church. In the end, it is about resilience.

All the works in this season are in conversation with the overarching theme—“the sensation of being an outsider looking in,” Puleio writes in the program note. He told Observer that “in Missa Brevis, the outsider is questioning. In The Traitor, the outsider is being forced outside. In Scherzo, the outsider gets to invite them into his world. It’s all those different outsider experiences. And then Two Ecstatic Themes is just a solo figure, just that person alone, figuring out falling, figuring out recovery, what it is to be by myself, to go through these things alone.”

But we are not alone, and these five dances spanning ninety-three years and plumb the depths of the human experience remind us of that.

The Limón Dance Company will be at The Joyce Theater through November 10.