José Limón

José Arcadio Limón was born on January 12, 1908, in Culiacán, Mexico, the eldest of twelve children. His family relocated to Los Angeles, California, in 1915, where he eventually graduated from Lincoln High School in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood. He went on to study at UCLA as an art major before moving to New York in 1928 to attend the New York School of Design. A performance by Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi in 1929 drew him toward dance, and he subsequently enrolled in the Humphrey-Weidman school.

Limón made his Broadway debut in 1930, the same year he choreographed his first dance, "Etude in D Minor," a duet with Letitia Ide. He also recruited Ide, Eleanor King, and Ernestine Stodelle to form a small ensemble called "The Little Group." Between 1932 and 1933, he appeared in the musical revue Americana and in Irving Berlin's As Thousands Cheer, the latter choreographed by Charles Weidman. Limón also pursued choreographic work at Broadway's New Amsterdam Theatre during this period, and performed in several productions including Humphrey's New Dance, Theatre Piece, and With My Red Fires, as well as Weidman's Quest.

In 1937, Limón was selected as a Bennington Fellow. Two years later, at the Bennington Festival at Mills College, his first major independent work, Danzas Mexicanas, was presented. He returned to Broadway to appear as a featured dancer in the musical Keep Off the Grass, choreographed by George Balanchine. In 1941, he departed the Humphrey-Weidman company to collaborate with May O'Donnell, with whom he co-choreographed pieces including War Lyrics and Curtain Riser. That October, he married Pauline Lawrence, a founding member and manager of the Humphrey-Weidman company. After the partnership with O'Donnell dissolved, Limón created work for a program at Humphrey-Weidman.

His final Broadway appearance came in 1943 in Balanchine's Rosalinda, which he performed alongside Mary Ellen Moylan. Later that year he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he worked with the Army Special Services division and collaborated with composers Frank Loesser and Alex North, producing several works including Concerto Grosso. Upon attaining American citizenship in 1946, Limón founded the José Limón Dance Company, inviting Doris Humphrey to serve as its artistic director — making it the first modern dance company to have an artistic director who was not also its founder. Among the company's founding members were Pauline Koner, Lucas Hoving, Betty Jones, Ruth Currier, and Limón himself. The company made its formal debut at Bennington College and reached New York by 1947, debuting at the Belasco Theatre with Humphrey's Day on Earth.

In 1948, the company began appearing at the Connecticut College American Dance Festival, returning each summer for many years. Limón choreographed The Moor's Pavane in 1949, a work based on Shakespeare's Othello that received the Dance Magazine Award for the year's most outstanding choreography. In the spring of 1950, Limón and his company performed in Paris alongside Ruth Page, becoming the first American modern dance company to appear in Europe. In 1951, he joined the faculty of The Juilliard School and also accepted an invitation from Mexico City's Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, where he created six works. The Limón Company was among the first to participate in the U.S. State Department's International Exchange Program, touring South America in 1954, followed by a five-month tour of Europe and the Near East, and additional tours of South America and Central America. Limón received his second Dance Magazine Award in 1957.

In 1956, Limón choreographed The Emperor Jones, loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's play of the same name and set to music by Heitor Villa-Lobos. The work generated controversy regarding its use of blackface for the role of Brutus Jones. Following a U.S. State Department-funded tour of the piece in Poland in 1958, a Polish official questioned whether the production had been permitted to use blackface in the United States. Limón responded in writing that the work was first and foremost a work of art, and that no one had prohibited or could prohibit its performance even in defiance of prevailing political and social conventions. Doris Humphrey, who had served as the company's artistic director, died in 1958, and Limón assumed her position. Between 1958 and 1960, he choreographed alongside Pauline Koner.

In 1962, the company performed as the opening act of New York's Shakespeare Festival in Central Park. The following year, under U.S. State Department sponsorship, Limón toured the Far East for twelve weeks and choreographed The Daemon to a score by Paul Hindemith, who conducted the premiere. In 1964, he received the Capezio Award and was appointed artistic director of the American Dance Theatre at Lincoln Center. He appeared the following year in an NET special titled The Dance Theater of José Limón. In 1968, he established the José Limón Foundation to carry on his work. Dancer and choreographer Louis Falco performed with the José Limón Dance Company from 1960 to 1970, and later starred opposite Rudolf Nureyev in Limón's Moor's Pavane on Broadway from 1974 to 1975.

Throughout his career, Limón developed what became known as Limón technique, an approach to movement that emphasizes the rhythms of falling and recovering balance, the use of body weight and dynamics, and the importance of breath in maintaining flow. Drawing on the theories of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, the technique employs large, visceral gestures — reaching, bending, pulling, and grasping — to communicate emotion, favoring movement that follows gravity and feels natural over the more stylized vocabulary of ballet. His choreographic subjects ranged from Shakespeare's Othello to the McCarthy hearings, as in The Traitor, and the life of La Malinche, interpreter for Hernán Cortés. He set his dances to music by composers including Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Arnold Schoenberg, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. José Arcadio Limón died on December 2, 1972.