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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on December 5, 2023
Deepa Liegel-Limón Dance Co. Photo: Allison Armfield
Including A Reimagining of The "Moors Pavane” by Hila Ben Ari, "I Must Be Circumstanced"
Limón Dance Company
Founders: José Limón and Doris Humphrey
Artistic Director: Dante Puleio
Executive Director: Michelle Preston
Associate Artistic Director: Logan Frances Kruger
Company Dancers: Natalie Clevenger, Joey Columbus, MJ Edwards, Mariah Gravelin, Johnson Guo, Deepa Liegel, Eric Parra, Nicholas Ruscica, Frances Lorraine Samson, Jessica Sgambelluri, Savannah Spratt, Lauren Twomley
Dances for Isadora, The Winged, Orfeo with choreography by José Limón
I Must be Circumstanced with choreography by Hilla Ben Ari
Catch Women’s Stories at New York Live Arts from December 7 - 9, 2023 (More info)
A dance is never danced the same way twice. Like life, dance is fleeting and continually in motion, unfolding moment by moment. Change is the essence of dance.
At the center of this galaxy of change lie the gravity of the dance canon and the politics of its repertory. Still, dance relies on the ever-evolving identities and interpretations of its dancers and their social context. So repertory and the canon must evolve along with its artists. The key question at hand is: “How?”
The Limón Dance Company is one example of a repertory company that is approaching this question while stewarding the legacy of one of the giants of 20th century modern dance, José Limón. Founded in 1946, the company today presents its established canonical works alongside a repertory of commissioned works by contemporary choreographers to enact their mission of preservation and advancement. The Limón company’s horizons continue to expand under the leadership of Artistic Director Dante Puleio, whose inclusive, forward-thinking vision has reinvigorated the company’s capacity to push boundaries and take new risks.
Mariah Gravelin of the Limón Dance Company in I Must be Circumstanced. Photo: Christopher Jones
For Puleio, these choices are a natural outgrowth of Limón’s vision and aesthetic in creating work “built on the human condition”—a condition which is always in flux. When reconstructing archival works from the Limón canon, Puleio and members of the company’s lineage work toward making the dance “look like what it felt like.” They craft an individualized coaching approach that takes into account previous interpretations while holding space for the current interpreter’s identity and agency. Reconstructors use video, choreographic notes, and their own embodied memory to revocalize the “structure and spirit of the dance” in a balanced way. The company dancers are also encouraged to be in dialogue with the work—dancers are paired with reconstructors as assistants in the restaging process to build and strengthen a direct lineage of embodied choreographic stewardship. For new work, Puleio sees the company’s choreographic commissions as a curatorial “bridge” that allows Limón’s work to remain in dynamic conversation with contemporary issues of identity, aesthetics, and experience in changing social contexts. Overall, he wants the company to include and reflect an expansive, future-looking vision of modern dance—and dancers—as a realm of limitless possibility.
Frances Lorraine Samson of Limón Dance Company in Dances for Isadora. Photo: Allison Armfield
Women’s Stories, the Limón company’s upcoming program at New York Live Arts, honors the female perspective by presenting iconic Limón repertory in a new light. All-female casts will dance Limón’s Dances for Isadora, an homage to legendary modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, the “Harpies” section of The Winged, and Orfeo, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The program also features I Must be Circumstanced, a much-anticipated world premiere by multimedia artist Hilla Ben Ari. The work reimagines Limón’s most revered work, The Moor’s Pavane—itself based on Shakespeare’s Othello—by focusing on the perspectives of its female characters.
The Limón repertory on the program reflects the choreographer’s multifaceted views of women as well as the central influence of women in his life and work. Dances for Isadora (1971) traces Duncan’s life story through a series of five solos that express her youth, maturity, grief, empowerment, and troubled end. Limón’s choreography, set to Chopin piano études, revels in Duncan’s grounded yet airy qualities through a kinetically expressive emotional range.
Frances Lorraine Samson (front), Savannah Spratt, Mariah Gravelin, Deepa Liegel in Photo shoot for Limón Dance Company in "The Winged." Photo: Kelly Puleio
This reverent biographical dedication stands in stark contrast with the “Harpies” section from The Winged (1966), which vividly depicts the menacing, predatory bird-woman hybrid monsters from Greek and Roman mythology. Angular shapes and rhythmic musical and physical motifs come alive through a ritualistic incantation for five dancers. While the work is aggressively dissonant and shockingly confrontational, it also bears the hallmarks of Limón’s refined technique and compositional craftsmanship.
Both Dances for Isadora and “Harpies” were originally choreographed on all-female casts, whereas Orfeo originally centered on a heterosexual lead couple. For Women’s Stories, female-identifying dancers Lauren Twomley and Mariah Gravelin will dance the roles of Orpheus and Eurydice, respectively, as they danced earlier this year in a gender-expansive rendition of the work. In rehearsals, Twomley works to balance “strength and softness” in her interpretation of Orpheus’s virtuosic opening solo; she explores textural nuances to merge power and vulnerability in her portrayal of the legendary Greek hero. The cast, which also includes Eurydice’s three fierce female guardians, works with Limón company Associate Artistic Director Logan Frances Krueger to problem-solve proportional differences in partnering mechanics, shifting angles of force and support to retain key compositional elements. These mechanical adjustments have expressive resonance that allow the work to retain an authentic essence and be experienced anew.
Savannah Spratt of Limón Dance Company in "I Must be Circumstanced." Photo: Christopher Jones
The Limón company takes a further leap of imagination with I Must be Circumstanced by deconstructing The Moor’s Pavane and reassembling the iconic work through a feminist lens. Ben Ari, a multimedia artist whose work spans print, sculpture, video, and installation work in dialogue with literature, theater, and dance, centers her work on the boundaries and perceptions of the female body. She emphasizes the importance of “listening to the body,” which has led to a particular fascination with the expressive resonance of stillness.
The artist encountered Limón’s work five years ago and was immediately drawn to its dramatic tension and tonal precision; she began discussions about a collaboration with the Limón company three years ago, with The Moor’s Pavane as her subject. Ben Ari’s interpretive layer builds on Limón and Shakespeare’s renderings of Desdemona and Emilia as polarized archetypes who are largely reactive to their male counterparts, Othello and Iago. By removing the male characters from the dance, Ben Ari moves the women’s stories from the margin to the center to “bring their muted presence forward” to express and trouble their spirits of devotion, resistance, and shared mourning.
Mariah Gravelin and Savannah Spratt of Limón Dance Company in "The Moors Pavane." Photo: Alison Armfield
Design and composition are key elements in Ben Ari’s choreographic reimagination: Jessica Sgambelluri as Desdemona and Frances Lorraine Samson as Emilia dance with and alongside life-size two-channel video projections of Savannah Spratt and Gravelin in the same roles—they serve as mirror, echo, shadow, and subconscious. This doubled female presence fills the space of male absence to foreground experiences of fidelity, coercion, violence, empathy, and redemption. Ben Ari thus reworks the structural frame of the quartet—central to Pavane’s courtly dance—while challenging the work’s narrative linearity and the psychic integrity of its characters. Within this frame, she distills Limón’s original choreography to the powerful essence of its most expressive postures and gestures. The dancers’ experience with the original work is vital to Ben Ari’s process as they call upon their embodied knowledge and probe their motivations to reframe their characters. To support this radical reimagination, newly commissioned music by Rea Mochiach quotes and deconstructs Pavane’s baroque score, just as Hilla Shapira’s costume design nods to Limón’s original through a subtle use of color and detail.
Women’s Stories shows that to truly live, established works need to be challenged in ways that allow them to remain relevant to the social contexts and identities of artists and audiences alike. The Limón company and its dancers do a great service to Limón's work by highlighting a diverse range of patterns and influences that shape the breadth of possibility in their canon. Likewise, reimagined works like I Must be Circumstanced can educate and enlighten audiences, give dancers an expanded, more inclusive language, and provide choreographers and multidisciplinary artists valuable material to be in conversation with.
By asking “how” in earnest and probing for answers with curiosity and purpose, the Limón company forges beyond the question of “what” to dance and even “why” to dance it. Honoring the canon and expanding repertory are symbiotic processes that interact to preserve dance history and advance the art form into the future. Through a dual process led by fidelity and imagination, the Limón company takes part in a vital collective movement in the dance field: to turn the canon from a static gatekeeper of authoritative values to a dynamic gateway rich with possibility. For the Limón company and for the future of dance, this “how” matters deeply: how to create new work, build repertory, plan and preserve choreographic legacies, and shape the canon as a living history—as gloriously alive and ever-changing as the artists on stage. This is how the work of a legacy company like Limón can be both historical and new, fresh, and exciting.
Puleio believes that Limón himself would appreciate the dynamism of this evolutionary modernist ethos that “responds to the bodies at hand,” much as the choreographer himself did in his day. By pushing beyond traditional casting and presentations of canonical and repertory works, the Limón company continues to reshape ideas, values, and opportunities for artistic expression. Because when the dancer changes, the dance changes. And when the dance changes, the dance lives—unfolding anew through every fleeting moment.
