Jose Limon/Limon Dance Company

[miliosr]

New season, new thread . . .

Here are some Limon Dance Company performances scheduled for the Fall:

09/17 LDC and Venezuela's Simon Bolivar National Youth Choir

Alice Tully Hall, New York

Rep: Missa Brevis

09/27 Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

Rep: There Is a Time

10/12 14th International Festival of Music & Dance, Bangkok, Thailand

Rep: Chaconne, The Moor's Pavane, There Is a Time and Rodrigo Pederneiras' Come With Me

10/24 J.P Morgan Chase Tower, New York

The Art of Dance and Music panel discussion w/ the LDC, Ballet Hispanico, Dzul Dance Company, and Paquito D'Rivera

11/03 Latino Cultural Center, Dallas, TX

Rep: Chaconne, The Moor's Pavane, There Is a Time and Pederneiras' Come With Me

[postponed due to Hurricane Sandy]

11/08 State Theater, New Brunswick, NJ

Rep: Chaconne, The Emperor Jones, Jiri Kylian's La Cathedrale Engloutie and Pederneiras' Come With Me

11/16 Tilles Center, Long Island, NY

Rep: Chaconne, The Emperor Jones, Kylian's La Cathedrale Engloutie and Pederneiras' Come With Me

11/20 Heritage High School, East Harlem, NY

Project Othello/Proyecto Otelo w/ TeatroStageFest

12/11 Americas Society, New York

Rep: Excerpts from revival of Mazurkas

[miliosr]

If you want to see The Moor's Pavane in October, you have several options as three separate companies (2 ballet, 1 modern) are presenting it:

American Ballet Theatre

10/05-10/05 -- Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

10/16-10/20 -- City Center, New York

Stager: Clay Taliaferro

Ballet Nice

10/04-10/09 -- Nice, France

Stager: Jennifer Scanlon

sjDanceco (a.k.a. the West Coast spinoff from the Limon Dance Company)

10/05-10/06 -- San Jose, California

Stager: Gary Masters

(All three stagers danced in Limon's company when he was alive so the "readings" of the "text" should be true.)

[miliosr]

An article about two upcoming (and separate) performances of The Moor's Pavane in California:

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Jos-Lim-n-s-The-Moor-s-Pavane-revived-3899665.php

[miliosr]

More Moor's Pavane in November:

Bavarian State Ballet

11/17, 11/19, 11/23, 11/29 -- Munich, Germany

Stager: Sarah Stackhouse

Diablo Ballet

11/15-11/17 -- Walnut Creek, California

Stager: Gary Masters

[miliosr]

Forty years ago this day, Jose Limon died at the age of 64. Thanks to the Herculean efforts of, among many, his successor artistic directors Ruth Currier (1973-1978) and Carla Maxwell (1978-present), the company, the repertory and the technique have survived to this very day.

This is all the more impressive when you consider the fate of so many of Limon's modern dance predecessors and contemporaries. Of the "Big Four" developers of modern dance in the United States, the Hanya Holm and Charles Weidman repertories are dead. The Doris Humphrey repertory barely clings to life at the Limon Dance Company. The Martha Graham repertory lives on at her successor company but, as has been widely reported, in increasingly suspect and stylistically wrongheaded form.

Of Limon's direct contemporaries, the record is equally bleak. The Erick Hawkins repertory is dead. The Anna Sokolow repertory hangs by a thread due to the efforts of three small successor companies. The Alwin Nikolais repertory fares marginally better thanks to the Ririe-Woodbury company -- but just marginally. The repertories of Limon's associates in his original company -- Lucas Hoving, Pauline Koner, Ruth Currier -- and his star male dancer in the 1960s -- Louis Falco -- are dead. Even the repertory of the Titian-like Merce Cunningham, barely three years after his death, is rapidly diminishing in terms of the number of performances of his works.

So, all in all, not a bad result for a company and a repertory that the critical establishment declared as dead or passe or whatever else after Limon's death.