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DAY IN THE LIFE OF DANCE: Limón Dance Company Rehearsing José Limón's "The Traitor"
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Published on October 14, 2024
Limón Dance Company. Photo: Steven Pisano
Logan Kruger, Associate Artistic Director and Rehearsal Director, Shares Her Approach to Limón Repertory
There’s something about observing dance in rehearsal that I find energizing — watching artists strive to pick up and perfect material; seeing the sweat; hearing the questions; witnessing small failures and victories step-by-step, gesture-by-gesture.
A phenomenal amount of care, thought, not to mention physical effort, goes into a dance before it’s costumed, lit, and made-up for the stage. By the time the process is complete, the labor will have evolved into story, a reflection, a provocation, or something-else-altogether. Perhaps what was once rough and prickly will come to seem inevitable. For now, the beauty and excitement lies in the rougher edges and how these are handled by everyone in the rehearsal room.
Early this September before the Limón Dance Company headed off to Kaatsbaan to work on a new commission by Kayla Farrish, photographer Steven Pisano and I met at the company’s uptown studio (the Everett Center for Performing Arts studios at 152nd Street, rented from the Dance Theatre of Harlem) to capture their rehearsal process in pictures and words.
Kieran King and Joey Columbus. Photo: Steven Pisano
We found the group preparing for their November season at The Joyce Theater, working on José Limón’s 1954 “The Traitor.” At this point, the company had just learned the entire piece (taught to them by former dancer, Kurt Douglas) and were beginning to delve into the nitty gritty details, section-by-section.
Created by Limón during the early days of the McCarthy hearings, “The Traitor” was his response to the pervasive air of betrayal in the arts and entertainment communities as hundreds of Americans were accused of being sympathetic to, spies for, or members of the Communist Party. Limón chose to use the story of Jesus’ betrayal at the hands of Judas Iscariot as a base for this originally all-male work. Today, performed with a mixed-gender cast (actually two mixed-gender casts for the Joyce shows) there are two main characters: The Leader (or Jesus figure) and The Traitor (Judas), along with a six-member corps referred to as The Followers.
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Johnson Guo (as The Traitor) and Eric Parra (as The Leader). Photo: Steven Pisano
Although Steven and I glimpsed only a sliver of this dance during its first in-depth rehearsal, from the onset, I saw distinct interpretations by the artists in the lead roles. Eric Parra, as the Leader had the inspired look of a visionary about him; while Johnson Guo, as the Traitor, appeared snarling, a wolf, geared to attack. MJ Edwards as the Leader had a sense of vulnerability about them, a certain melancholy, and Nicholas Ruscica's Traitor seemed conflicted and reluctant. It will be fascinating to see the contrasts come performance time.
One can sense immediately an atmosphere of collegiality in the studio, something you don’t always feel when walking into a dance workplace. Dante Puleio, the artistic director, and Logan Kruger, associate artistic director and the rehearsal director of the group, run the show, but everyone easily shares input, insights, and laughter. Puleio likes this kind of interchange telling me that he wants dancers to feel invested. Even choosing new choreographers for the company is not a top down decision. The dancers are always part of the equation. Puleio adds, laughing, but quite sincere, “I want them to stay.”
Kruger conducts rehearsal with vigor. Neither she or Puleio gives notes without somehow jumping into the fray. Even sitting on the sidelines they seem to be moving along with the cast. The physical participation is “just how I understand the work,” says Kruger, “and also, how I can help other people get to where they want to get to. I am always interested in how our experience of the physicality, can inform and drive the storytelling.”
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Logan Kruger gives notes to the company. Photo: Steven Pisano
Logan Kruger gives notes to the company. Photo: Steven Pisano
Kruger has been a Limón company member since 2009, its rehearsal director since 2017, and as of 2021, the associate artistic director of the company. But the Atlanta, Georgia native has been involved with Limón even longer than that.
“I studied with an amazing woman named Annette Lewis in Atlanta. She was always trying to expose us to different styles of dance. One of her former students, Pamela Jones Malavé, had gone on to join the Limón company and would come back to Atlanta to give us workshops. So, from the time I was probably seven or eight, I was taking those workshops. Then by the time I was nine, we, a children's modern dance company called Good Moves, would raise money dancing on the sidewalk in front of restaurants. We actually made enough money to buy ourselves Amtrak tickets from Georgia to New York to take a two-week intensive with the Limón company alongside the adults… I came to New York every summer (my mom was a chaperone) to take a children's version of the Limón intensive. By the time I was a teenager, I was taking the regular summer intensive classes.”
“What was it that intrigued a young person about this style?” I asked. “When did you know that 'this’ is what you wanted to do?”
“I was rapt by it,” says Kruger. "I remember one summer, it might have been the first summer when I was nine. Clay Taliaferro was on the faculty, and I remember, sitting under the piano, watching him teach the adults. He is a very tall person with large hands. And we were these, little peanuts, you know. He just seemed like a giant. He was teaching a solo with hand gestures. And I was taken away by the expressivity in his hands. It was very immediate to me, even as a young child, the power of the gestures and the power of natural movement to be so expressive…By the time I was 14, I felt like the hook was in me. That summer, Carla [Maxwell, then the artistic director of the company] was preparing to reconstruct "PSALM." There was a big revival of that work in 2002 so this was maybe a summer or two prior. She set the opening section of which we call ‘the walking dance’ on us. And there's a section of that dance called ‘the coda’ which is very rhythmic. It has all these crazy rhythms, 7’s and 13’s , very intricate patterns that José often has in his work. For me, it was the music, that rhythm, that got into me, and I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I was so lucky to have been observing these dancers for my whole, life, and so I asked them all, ‘Where did you go to school, where did you study?’ They said Juilliard. So, I had a goal set, and I just made it happen.”
Dante Puleio gives notes to Eric Parra and group. Photo: Steven Pisano
On the day we visited rehearsal, some of the kinks to work out were traffic jams and the mechanics of lifts. How could the Leader seem majestic, lighter than air, as if they could walk on water? How could the Followers dance through the action of the Leader and the Traitor without taking focus away from that relationship? How could one avoid an elbow in the eye?
The sculptural integrity of Limón’s groupings is paramount as dancers propel themselves from one place to another. The rich compositional arrangements remind us of Limón's visual art background, yet, like "The Moors Pavane," this is a theatrical piece where clear relationships are crucial to a storyline.
When a question pops up, there’s discussion and often referral to old videos. Douglas, who staged this version, and Puleio danced an earlier iteration taught to them by Taliaferro, who instructed from memory. Until recently the earliest video the Limón Foundation had, was a 1954 made-for-TV version that Kruger describes as “wonky” because it was created for the spatial needs of a production studio, not the proscenium stage. However, this past June, Kruger discovered the existence of films of the original Limón Dance Company taken at at the American Dance Festival in 1955, which were made specifically for the documentation purposes. "The Traitor" was among them. After watching a recording at the New York Public Library, Kruger contacted ADF and received a digitized copy from them for company’s collection. She describes finds such as this, along with videos of interviews with original cast members as one of the satisfying aspects of her job.
“The thing that I keep coming back to the more I study old films is [that] dancers today are of a different technical level, and our interpretation of the work has evolved to reflect the capabilities of the bodies that are in the room. I think to a certain degree that is correct. These are our bodies today, right? Yet, sometimes we can go to an extreme, I call it ‘dance-ifying,’ [the work]…adding all this flourish which may not actually support what you want to say. For me the old films have really unlocked this idea about the immediacy of people interacting with each other and the purpose of gestures.”
“What is so spectacular about this work in particular, and what also makes it difficult to re stage, is that each each character, is having a individualistic experience of the events that are unfolding…It’s as if I’m directing eight solos at once, and I want to see through their physicality who each character is. How does each person react to the presence of a great leader, or to the presence of danger? It’s interesting to see that everybody is having a unique, specific, and true reaction. This challenges the dancers. How do we keep the space alive for all of that? The suspense, the tension, needs to be there from the moment they enter the space until the lights go out at the end. And that takes a lot of work, a lot of investigation.”
- End of day one's rehearsal -
Catch The Limón Dance Company at The Joyce from Tuesday - Sunday, November 5 - 10, 2024.
The Limón Dance Company celebrates its 78th season with a powerhouse program that illustrates José Limón’s perspective as an outsider and underscores his lasting influence on generations to come. Audiences will explore a rich tapestry of stories and emotions, with each piece acting as a window into the lives of those who often remain unseen. MORE INFO.
