Jose Limon

Jose Limon danced until he was sixty and made The Moor's Pavane, a version of Othello for four dancers that lasts twenty minutes. He was born in Culiacan, Mexico, and brought to Los Angeles as a child when the revolution reached his family; he went to New York intending to be a painter, saw a recital by the German dancer Harald Kreutzberg and abandoned it that week. He trained under Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, danced in their company for ten years, served in the army, and formed his own in 1946 with Humphrey as artistic director - an unusual arrangement in which the older choreographer shaped a company she did not dance in. His subject was almost always a man under moral pressure, and he danced those parts himself with a weight and gravity that came directly from Humphrey's fall-and-recovery principle. The Moor's Pavane in 1949 compresses the whole of Othello into a court dance. There is Time and Missa Brevis followed. The company he founded was the first modern dance company to survive its founder and still performs; the technique is taught worldwide. He became an American citizen in 1946 and the State Department sent the company abroad repeatedly as cultural diplomacy, including to South America in 1954 and to eastern Europe. Humphrey directed the company until she died in 1958 and he continued alone for fourteen years. The Emperor Jones and The Traitor are among his other narrative works. He taught at Juilliard from 1953. The Limon technique, built on weight, breath and the suspension at the top of a fall, is one of the four or five modern techniques still formally taught, and the company celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2021.

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