Out of the Woodshed

All summer thick-thighed youngsters and greying masters of modern dance had been hard at work in their various sylvan woodsheds, chipping and chopping at works both new & old. Last week, some of the chips flew into public view.

At bucolic Jacob's Pillow at Lee, Mass., summer dance fans and Manhattan critics crowded into the big wooden barn-studio to see the first performance of aging (57) Ted Shawn's The Dreams of Jacob, with music by Darius Milhaud. Critics found his new five-movement work both a little flat and a little obvious--Jacob dancing unimaginatively with Rachel, wrestling too literally with the dark angel. The verdict: back to the woodshed.

Old Masters. At New London's Connecticut College, which with New York University established a modern dance center last year after Bennington College (Vt.) had dropped it during the war, new chips were falling almost daily.

First, fans saw one of the old masters in an old work: tall, dark-skinned Jose Limon in Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. Last week, they saw him again in a smashing new work by the same choreographer. Unlike her Lament, Choreographer Doris Humphrey's new Invention had no story and no characterization; it was pure dance, but with plenty of invention. By the time Limon & Co. (Betty Jones, Ruth Currier) had gotten through its four brief sections (a bright, gay solo, a duo, a meditative slow movement and a powerful recapitulation) they and Choreographer Humphrey had won an ovation. New works by other American Dance Festival regulars, including Sophie Maslow's fine but unfinished Festival, based on stories by Yiddish Story Writer Sholom Aleichem, and Jane Dudley's wispy Vagary (music by Bela Bartok), suffered by comparison.

Angular Wives. To dance enthusiasts, some of the most interesting work of the summer had been that of a newcomer to New London--a big, breezy, Texas girl who had arrived via Broadway instead of Bennington.

Leggy, almond-eyed Valerie Bettis, 28, discovered as a gaminish youngster that "when I was dancing, I knew who I was." She studied in Manhattan with Hanya Holm, and in 1941 gave a debut recital. Her The Desperate Heart won big notices in 1943. But it was not until Valerie stopped the show in Bea Lillie's Inside U.S.A. last year with her tawny "Tiger Lily" dance that anyone but modern dance devotees was very sure who she was.

When opening-night New London townspeople first saw her three-year-old Yerma, a grim study of wifely frustrations, some were not sure how they liked it. Valerie's angular movements seemed almost as if they had been laid out with a carpenter's rule. Later, most found it easier to applaud her powerful adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Perilous Prose. Fortnight ago she gave her new Domino Furioso, with music by her Brazilian-born Pianist-Husband Bernardo Segall. As in The Desperate Heart and As I Lay Dying, she had employed a narrator. In Domino, a loose theatrical piece about Harlequins, Columbines and Pierrots who rebel against their playwright, there was more narration than choreography.

Complained New York Times Critic John Martin: "If Miss Bettis is not careful, she will talk us all to death...Apparently all dancers have to learn sooner or later that even more to be avoided than sprains and charley horses is the Commedia dell' Arte, and Miss Bettis has undertaken to learn the hard way."

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