Charles Weidman

Charles Weidman brought comedy into American modern dance at a moment when the form took itself very seriously indeed. He came from Lincoln, Nebraska, trained at Denishawn from 1920, and left it in 1928 with Doris Humphrey over a vaudeville booking they refused; the two ran a company and school together in New York for seventeen years, in which she made the tragic group works and he made most of the funny ones. His method was kinetic pantomime - gesture abstracted until the narrative is legible without anything being mimed literally - and the best of it, like the Thurber suite Fables for Our Time and the autobiographical On My Mother's Side, is genuinely comic rather than merely light. He was also a strong technician who choreographed on Broadway and taught a generation, including Bob Fosse and Jack Cole, which is one of the routes by which modern dance reached the American musical. The partnership with Humphrey ended in 1945 and his later companies were undercapitalised and short-lived. He taught almost daily in a studio on the Upper West Side until the year he died. Lynchtown, made in 1936 out of a childhood memory of a mob, is the one serious work of his that is still regularly revived and is nothing like the comedies. He and Humphrey shared a house as well as a studio, though he was gay and their partnership was professional. He choreographed for the musicals As Thousands Cheer and I d Rather Be Right and staged operas at the Metropolitan. Alcoholism and money trouble marked his middle years. The Expression of Two Arts Theatre, which he ran with the sculptor Mikhail Santaro, gave weekly performances in a converted studio to tiny audiences for his last decade.

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