As a part of the Onstage Series at Connecticut College, The Limón Dance Company graced the Palmer Auditorium stage on Friday evening. It is very fitting that the company pay Connecticut College a visit during its centennial year, a year of celebrating the college’s history. As fate would have it, the company already has a place in the college’s history, having performed the work “The Emperor Jones” here on Palmer stage in 1957 just a year after its premiere.
The company wonderfully presented three works by the late José Limón, one of the founders of the company, and a pioneer within the modern dance world. These works including, “There Is A Time,” “Chaconne” and “The Emperor Jones” were accompanied by a fourth work entitled, “La Cathedrale Engloutie” choreographed by Jiří Kylián.
The evening was filled with presentations of group works as well as a solo piece, each work proving to be as awe-inspiring and stunning as the next. The dancers gracefully moved across the stage with what seemed to be effortlessness. Having had the opportunity to take a master class with the company’s artistic director, Carla Maxwell, I can assure you that the coordination and precision demonstrated on the Palmer stage was not nearly as easy as it appeared.
The principle of using breath to guide movement is a staple of the Limón movement, which was early identifiable in the performance. Even a simple lean to one side seemed to have more life than one would expect it to. Through the connectivity with the breath, the dancers were able to extend their movement far beyond their own bodies. The energy they emitted was boundless, and continued to inhabit the space long after they shifted to another movement.
The stage was flooded with costumes of intense color. Warm spring reds and deep purples were accompanied by many other strikingly colorful fabrics. These colors seemed to float, coast and glide through the air, aiding the dancers’ movement through space. Often the dancers seem to mimic the appearance of their costumes, pushing through the air with a textured quality. They also pushed one another’s bodies to perform different movements, folding into and against one another and using shift and transfer of weight to move seamlessly into the next movements. Each transition was not only seamless, but it was also innovative and exciting. The element of surprise was so thrilling that I could feel an eagerness swelling within me throughout the performance of each work.
Another one of the outstanding aspects of the performance was the remarkable musical quality of the movement. The dancers had such a strong connection to the music. As the music seemed to sing within their bodies, they sang legato, at times added contrasting rhythm and also sang rhythms that they created on their own bodies in the space. Each was always informed by the music and engaged in a very provocative conversation with it.
Overall, there was a grand motif of circularity within the performance. Yes, there were clear visual formations of circles; however, there were also spiraling movements that created a centrifugal and circular atmosphere within the space. Even further than that, the movement had a circular quality about it through timelessness. All of the works seemed to still have a clear connection to the time they were originally choreographed. I felt as if the dancers were bringing me back to the place where the dances were in their first performance rather than bringing the dances to where the show was staged. It has this ability to transcend the “present”, the “now” and the “here” and it connects audience and dancer through the cyclical nature of time.
