Doris Humphrey is a capital figure in the History of Modern dance. Her ideas of balance and inbalance, movement and fall, animated her choreography. While Martha Graham was exploring her interial landscapes, the Humphrey Weidman Company was experimenting with man’s relation to the world about him. In 1936, Doris Humphrey premiered With my Red Fires, the second part of a trilogy. The first was New Dance, premiered the year previously. The third was Theater Piece.

With my Red Fires is the story of a conflict between romantic love and posessive love. In it, two lovers find one another. But the matriarch, played in the original by Miss Humphrey herself, falls upon society to destroy the lovers. Love and hate, Order and desorder, conflict and harmony, all play a part in the drama.  

« For the Divine appearance is  

Brotherhoo, but I am Love

Elevate in to the Region of Brotherhood

with my red fires »

From Jerusalem II

by William Blake

Source: Dance Works of Doris Humphrey Part 1, DVD  

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Doris Humphrey was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1895 and grew up in Chicago. Her father operated a residence home for vaudeville performers called the Palace Hotel, and her mother offered piano lessons. As a girl, Humphrey studied piano, ballet, ballroom dance, Americanized Delsarte and Dalcroze's system of Eurythmics. A talented dancer, she began teaching ballet and interpretive dance to children when she was 15. During the next few years, Humphrey traveled the Santa Fe railroad line with a variety troupe, giving performances to railroad employees of her home-made aesthetic dances and Spanish numbers. When she returned home to Oak Park she began her own studio with her mother as accompaniest and business manager.

By 1931, the Humphrey and Weidman companies and their joint studio/school were firmly established in New York City. With Graham, Humphrey was considered by most critics to be a primary innovator of the new modern dance. Her theory of "fall and recovery"-- and the technique that sprang from it--was the foundation of her teaching method and her choreography. Underlying it, according to Humphrey, was the German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche's idea about the split in the human psyche between each person's Apollonian side (rational, intellectual) and our Dionysian side (chaotic, emotional). The true essence of the modern dance was the movement that happened in between these extremes, which Humphrey labeled "the arc between two deaths."

Source: University of Pittsburg

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pitt.edu

Specialists in the publishing and distribution of dance books and dance videos for over 35 years, with a list of over 500 dance related titles. We publish under the imprint Dance Horizons and distribute for The Dance Notation Bureau and Dance Books Ltd. In March of 2000 we launched a new imprint to publish books of general interest, Elysian Editions, with The Magic Of Provence: Pleasures of Southern France by Yvone Lenard. Visit our Elysian Editions pages to see Ms. Lenard's books as well as other titles under this imprint.  

Source: Princeton Book Co. Publishers

More information: https://www.dancehorizons.com