Doris Humphrey

Doris Humphrey built a technique out of the moment a body starts to fall and catches itself, and wrote the first serious book on how dances are made. She trained at Denishawn, toured Asia with the company, and left in 1928 with Charles Weidman after refusing to take part in a vaudeville engagement Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn had accepted. Her principle was fall and recovery: all movement lives in the arc between standing still and lying down, and the interest is in the risk of the middle. Where Martha Graham worked from the breath and the contraction, Humphrey worked from weight and gravity, and where Graham built solos around herself, Humphrey composed for groups and is the better choreographer of ensembles - The Shakers, With My Red Fires, New Dance. Arthritis ended her performing in 1945 and she became artistic director for Jose Limon, whose company carried her method forward and still teaches it. The Art of Making Dances, finished shortly before she died and published in 1959, is the first book to treat choreography as a craft with rules that can be taught, and it remains on syllabuses. She and Charles Weidman ran a company and school together in New York for seventeen years. Water Study, made in 1928, is performed in complete silence with the dancers timing themselves off each other s breath, and is still taught. With My Red Fires and Passacaglia are her largest group works. She choreographed for Limon until the year she died, including some of the pieces the company is best known for. Her papers and her notation scores are held at the New York Public Library, which is why the work can still be reconstructed.

• Lived: 1895 CE – 1958 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist