Something a Man Can Do

Jose Limon's girl friend had to drag him to his first modern dance recital. That was 17 years ago. He watched the great German dancer Harald Kreutzberg do his "Angel of Last Judgment," turned to the girl and said: "Charlotte, my God, that's what I want to do!" That kind of dancing, he decided, "looked like something a man could do without being ridiculous." Last week, looking far from ridiculous, Jose Limon and his company danced two of his infrequent recitals before sell-out crowds in New York. Critics now rank him with the best of U.S. male modern dancers.

At 39, Limon is still a dedicated man. Mexican-born, he quit college in Los Angeles to study art in Manhattan, had no dance training at all when friends sent him to Dancers Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, a pair of experimenters whom dance historians bracket with Martha Graham. In his ten years with their group Limon was first student, then teacher and featured soloist. Limon left them only because he was ready to go out on his own. Still his adviser, Doris Humphrey runs many of his rehearsals, did the choreography for two of the four works in his present repertory (the other two are his own). Says she: "He's my pride and joy. He has everything. He has bulk, a beautiful physique, strength, grace, control, the highest ideals, brains, an ear for music."

Grand Canyon without Pirouettes. Tall (6 ft.) and dynamic, Limon spent 2 1/2 years in the Army (he got out in 1945) but lost none of his technique there. He believes in clarity of line and clarity of story in dancing, is one of the few modern dancers a non-aficionado audience can watch and understand through a whole program-Classical ballet, he thinks, is unAmerican. Says he: "The ballet is such a sophisticated vocabulary. It's perfect for the experiences of lords and ladies, princesses and fairies and other imaginary characters. But those of us who want to talk about our own environment here find it inadequate. You can't say it in terms of entrechats and pirouettes. It's as though you wanted to say something about the Grand Canyon or the Mississippi and had to do it in the French language."

Each time Limon puts on a recital, he has to borrow production money, pay it back from the box-office take. Says he: "We just barely break even. Everyone gets paid but me." What money he earns comes from a back-breaking teaching program: at Manhattan's Dance Players Studios, at the Katharine Dunham School, at Boston's Duncanbury School of the Arts, at Sarah Lawrence College.

Limon knows "it would be easy to go to Hollywood and make a lot of money and buy an automobile and a suburban home. But for what? Anybody can be comfortable." (Not so averse to Broadway money, he danced in As Thousands Cheer and Keep off the Grass.) Says he: "I don't know what other way I'd want to spend my life. If I couldn't dance, I wouldn't want to live."

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