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Limón's La Malinche: Negotiating the In-Between

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Shelley C. Berg
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Extract

The artist; disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.

The true artist, capable, practicing, skillful,

Maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist draws out all from his heart

Náhuatl text quoted in Keen (1971, 23)

Dancer and choreographer José Limón was an artist of epic proportions, both in terms of the scope of his creative energy and the depth of his passionate humanism. Many of his dances speak to his search for the nobility in the human spirit, while others explore darker themes of betrayal, conflict, and despair. Whatever the subject or theme, Limón's dances reveal a consummate craftsman, a devout formalist who sought to reconcile, through his dances, the drama of emotion with the exigencies of choreographic composition and design. As a choreographer, Limón was often most eloquent in creating compact dance-dramas with archetypal, mythic, or literary characters: The Moor's Pavane, The Exiles, The Emperor Jones, and La Malinche.

Limón belongs to the second generation of American modern dancers; in his memoirs, the choreographer metaphorically casts Isadora Duncan and Harald Kreutzberg as his “parents,” Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman as his “foster parents,” and Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn as his “grandparents.” His true origins, while more prosaic, were central to his life as a creative artist. Limón was born in the city of Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. His father, Florencio Limón, was a musician, “a pedagogue, conductor and director of the State Academy of Music” (Garafola 1999, 1). His mother, Francisca, came from a good bourgeois family.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Summer 2005 , pp. 75 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2005

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