Music: All the Big Muscles

Ballet had brilliantly proved its right to a permanent home at New York’s City Center (TIME, Dec. 12). For a fortnight, the barefoot brethren of the modern dance had been demonstrating their case for adoption.

For the first time in U.S. dance history, just about all of the big brains and muscles in modern dance—José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm—were flexing together in one theater to do it. And all their fervid followers seemed to be on hand to give them palm-pounding support.

The fans saw only one brand-new work: Charles Weidman’s Rose of Sharon, based on the Song of Solomon. With some ugly costumes, and little in the way of dance but posing and posturing, Rose had virtually no fragrance at all. But there were plenty of older works, nine of them new to Broadway, to carry the case. The best dances:

¶Weidman’s version of James Thurber’s Fables for Our Time, which proved as witty as it had at first showing at Jacob’s Pillow, near Lee, Mass., two years ago (TIME, July 28, 1947). As the man who comes upon a unicorn in his garden, as a chipmunk and as The Owl Who Was God, rubber-faced Dancer Weidman proved himself just about the master mime and top funny man of modern dance. ¶Sophie Maslow’s Festival, an excerpt from an unfinished work called The Village I Knew, based on the folk tales of great Yiddish Storyteller Sholem Aleichem. With an apt little score by Samuel Matlowsky to help, Choreographer Maslow caught all the gay sentimental charm of Aleichem’s folk-dancing village, and the Dudley-Maslow-Bales trio and the New Dance Group danced it with flashing style and color.

¶José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavanne—Othello to music by Purcell. Limón had provided swirling and courtly choreography for his three accompanying dancers (representing lago, Desdemona, Emilia). And with his dramatic, high-cheekboned, deep-eyed face and high-voltage gestures, big Mexican-born Dancer Limón himself was superb as the blackly jealous giant.

Last week, as the fortnight came to a close, fans had seen 30 dances by 13 choreographers. It looked as if the modern dancers, too, might be at City Center to stay. As the new City Center Dance Theatre, they were looking forward to another Manhattan season of leaps and lunges in the spring.