Limón Dance Company explores push-pull of emotion

[UPDATED 6/4/25] The mission of New York-based Limón Dance Company is to showcase and adapt the work of its namesake José Limón while also commissioning pieces from new choreographers, creating a blend of contemporary and original work.

Artistic director Dante Puleio explained that the company primarily performs works created by Limón from 1935 to 1972, the year the choreographer died. Limón founded the company in 1946, and once he started performing pieces, he often reworked them as well.

“A lot of his work evolved over time,” Puleio said. “So now when I go back I can look at this collection of his work and pick from a couple different versions.”

While this is the company’s usual process for preparing pieces, they are not following it for “Missa Brevis,” one of the works they are presenting at Spoleto Festival USA this year. They will be performing with the Festival Chorus.

“José made this piece after returning from Poland after World War II, as a response to the hope he saw in all of these people. He wanted to know, ‘How can you rebuild after everything has been divested?’ And they responded with ‘We have to have hope for the future,’” Puleio said.

Carrying Limón’s spirit forward

Puleio explained that this is at the core of all of Limón’s work: the balance of hope and despair, and how as part of the human condition we are constantly bouncing from one to the other.

This connection of humanity and community is apparent not only through the work and the pieces the company performs but also in the performers and people in the company themselves.

Dancer Lauren Twomley agreed that Limón’s choreography — and everything the company brings to the stage — is about connection, humanity and looking at things from multiple perspectives. This is true of a recent work they commissioned, “Join” by Azure Barton, which they will also perform at the festival this year.

“Azure’s work is very abstract, but the sense of community that’s in ‘Missa Brevis’ is also present in ‘Join,’” said Twomley. “You don’t actually know what we are doing, but somehow the humanity of all of the work we do always seeps through.”

“Join” was created in response to a portion of Limón’s unpublished memoir where he describes a lost work from his mentor, Doris Humphrey.

“It was one of her greatest masterpieces, but no one ever got to see it. It was such a huge work that it never got the money it needed so it never got produced and we have no footage of it,” said Puleio. He said the company is “threading together the past of something from Doris, created through the words of José, into the minds and bodies of artists today.”

This is the approach, it seems, Puleio takes to most of the shows he creates. He doesn’t focus on certain roles people have played before or gendered casting. He simply looks at the dancers in front of him and pays attention to who is connecting with the work in a certain way, as he said, and how he can create a new thread that connects them all.

Dancing through the present moment

The show being performed at Spoleto strikes a balance between hope and despair, and the tug of war those forces create for humans. But the company doesn’t rely on happy accidents — every performance is meticulously planned and curated.

“We opened our fall season the night after the election,” Puleio said. “I knew that energies and moods were going to be in a specific place. And no matter which way the election went, I wanted to make sure that the program we put together gave people a place to turn to and live inside these really big emotions.”

This included his dancers.

Twomley said she wasn’t sure she would be able to perform — as she tends to isolate during tough moments — but was so glad she did that night.

“The second I stepped into the theater, everyone just kind of looked at each other and I was like, ‘Oh, you can be held. It’s OK to let people see you kind of fall apart and we can hold each other up,’” Twomley said. “This work is the perfect place to be held.”

In times when hope and connection seem hard to find, it’s only natural the company would take on some of these themes, said Puleio, adding that this was the ethos of Limón’s work.

“We did ‘Missa Brevis’ to give our audience that level of hope, depending on what they were feeling and what the results were,” he said. “I wanted to make sure there was a space that offered hope. So when I am curating seasons, I’m constantly looking at where we are and why things are happening.”

Twomley agreed.

“Community through art is literally the most essential thing,” she said, “and is my lifeline.”

The show will play May 31 and June 1 at Festival Hall.

Madey Lynch is an arts journalism graduate student at Syracuse University.