GREAT AMERICAN DANCERS

DORIS HUMPHREY CHARLES WEIDMAN

NATION'S CRITICS PAY TRIBUTE

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, MONDAY,MARCH 14

 

 

THE NEW YORK TIMES,

 

Dancers Score

InS. F. Recital

By ALFRED FRANKENSTEIN

When Doris Humphrey, Charles
Weidman and their dance group
concluded their first San Fran-
cisco performance yesterday after-

noon at the Curran Theater the
audience rose and cheered and ap-
plauded both loud and long. For
we had witnessed what seemed to
one observer to be the most ma-
ture, most wisely created, most
completely realized group composi-
tion in the modern dance vein that
this city has so far been privileged
to see. “New Dance” was its title.
Miss Humphrey is its main author,
although one of its high moments
is credited to Mr. Weidman.

“New Dance” is a symphony in
movement, and a great one. It is
obviously the creation of one who
sees both life and art whole,
rounded and true. It is not the
prodict of academic experiment in
new dance forms, sterile of meaning
except as an exercise in possibili-
ties. Still less is it dependent upon
suggestilon and association outside
itself. It is altogether of the dance
as a fine art of plastic human
action, speaking its own self-suffi-
cient language, its utterance alto-
gether charged with vitality, power
and idealism.

POSITIVE THEMES

“‘New Dance’ represents. the
growth of the individual in rela-
tionship to its fellows in an ideal
state,” one reads in the program
note. Well, maybe it does, but it
seems to me no more “representa-
tive’ of anything than a symphony
by Beethoven is_ representative.
But, just as the Bonn master’s sym-
phonies carry implicit within their
musical patterns a dramatic conflict
worked out to a spiritually affirma-
tive conclusion, so this dance piece
states its masculine and feminine
themes, develops and intermixes
them through tension, growth and
contrast, finally carries them over
to joyous resolution and release. |

 

 

It is a work in the grand style,
heroic, vivid, amazingly rich in
choreographic ideas, as sonorous to
the eye as Beethoven or Brahms to
the ear. It never halts in its or-
ganized flow, never relies, as do so
many group compositions both of
the ballet and the modern school,
upon the tableau, but constantly
lives. And many a choreographer
with a hundred dances at his dis-
posal fails utterly to creafe the
sense of big mass movement that
Miss Hurmphrey here achieves with
13 performers.

The modern dance has been too
exclusively a feminine province, and
part of the fine significance of “New
Dance” is its exploitation of the
virile element. Mr. Weidman’s spe-
cial star performance, however, was
in his own story piece entitled “The
Happy Hypocrite,” after the satiric
tale by Max Beerbohm.

This, was a gorgeous, uproarious
fantasy, wonderfully inventive in
the action, which was always chore-
ographic, but was deliciously panto-
mimic, too. The work has genuine
dance form.

SUPERB VEHICLE

It is a superb vehicle for the
comic dance personality of Weid-
man himself as the Lord George
Hell who is transformed by a mask
into Lord George Heaven, as well as
those of Sybil Shearer as the lord’s
mistress, Edith Orcutt as the Merry
Dwarf, Katherine Litz as the un-
spoiled object of Lord George’s af-
fections, and Jose Limon as the
maker of the masks. (Limon also
played a very big part in “New
Dance.”) One of the things I liked
best about “The Happy Hypocrite”

jis that it seems to be the product
of an American sense of humor.

One felt an American kind of
comedy at work, both in the chore-
ography and in the music by G.
*Zerbert Elwell.

And so the first local concert by
the Humphrey-Weidman group goes
into the record as one of the sea-
son’s outstanding successes. Yester-

|day we saw only a small part of

their total repertoire. One hopes
they will be back with more before
many months have passed.

NOW BOOKING FOR 1938-1939 TOUR
Company of 15 Men and Women Dancers

 

 

 

MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 1938.

HILARITY FEATURE»
OF DANCE RECITAL

By JOHN MARTIN

When an audience leaves a dance
recital laughing gayly, as Doris
Humphkrey’s and Charles Weid-
man’s audience left the Guild The-
atre last night, that is news. As if
deliberately to prove that the mod-
ern dance is not necessarily devoted
to solemnity, both dancers ostenta-
tiously snubbed the tragic muse and
went in for unabashed hilarity. To
make the paradox complete, it was
Mr. Weidman, usually the comedian
of the team, who introduced the
nearest thing to a serious theme in
his new work, ‘This Pa:sion,’’
while Miss Humphrey turned whole-
heartedly to Thurber and farce in
her new work, ‘‘Race of Life.’’

‘This Passion’”’ is the tersest and
best built of all Mr. Weidman’s
larger works to date. He has chosen
in it to develop simultaneously
three completely separate themes,
allowing them to borrow suspense
and vitality from each other
through contrast. One theme pic-
tures in fairly broad pantomime a
sordid triangle murder, another
shows in a more fantastic style a
world that has become acclimated
to air raids and other military hor-
rors, and the third theme deals in
terms of abstraction with ‘‘the aspi-
ration to a saner order.”

The first is the most successful,
largely because of Miss Humphrey’s
excellent performance in an unac-
customed medium. Mr. Weidman
has compelled her to lay aside her
usually aristocratic air and become
a frowsy vulgarian, which she does
with complete conviction. The air-
raid theme also contains a number
of amusing moments. Mr. Weid-
man, José Limén, George Bockman

 

and Katherine Manning have the

PAULINE LAWRENCE, Personal Representative
31 West 10th Street

other roles, and the work as a
‘whole is well performed. Its music
is by Norman Lloyd.

Miss Humphrey’s ‘‘Race of Life’’
is pure nonsense, based on the
drawings and story by James Thur-

'ber of a family bent on winning

wealth. With ‘‘Excelsior’’ written
on their banner, they encounter In-
dians, marital infidelity and bad
dreams, but eventually scale the
heights and gain apparently fabu-
lous amounts of gold. As Dorothy
Parker’s program note says, ‘‘Any-

‘thing may be read into it‘or left

out of it without making a great
deal of difference.’’

Both in her choreography and
especially in her characterization of
the materfamilias, Miss Humphrey
has caught the indescribable Thur-
ber sense of comedy. Aided by a
marvelously shapeless costume (pre-
sumably designed by Pauline Law-
rence, though uncredited on the
program), she assumes the amoeba-
like figure of a Thurber woman to
perfection, and maintains the same
style in all her movements. José

Limon is her husband and Charles |.

Weidman their little boy, who ac-
company her on the campaign for
success, but it is obviously she who
rules the expedition.

Edith Orcutt has a ridiculous bit
as a ‘‘Beautiful Stranger’ who in-
volves Father in a momentary af-
fair, and she plays it superbly.
George Bockman, Sybil Shearer and
Katherine Litz constitute other
menaces to the family’s progress,
and carry on with fine humor the
general foolishness of the thing.
Nor does Vivian Fine’s musical set-
ting miss a single opportunity to be
as disarmingly silly as the stage
doings. Certainly Miss Humphrey
as a character actress and farceuse
has been keeping something from
us all these years.

Neither of these works, to be
sure, comes under the heading of
pure dance by any stretch of the
imagination. To prove that the
company has not deserted its
former field, ‘‘To The Dance’”’ with
music by Clair Leonard, and
“Variations and Conclusions’? from
“New Dance’ with Wallingford
Riegger’s music, respectively,
opened and closed the program.

The audience was a very large
one and manifested its pleasure in
no uncertain terms,

 

New York City 3