At the Feet of the Masters

Working with Charles Weidman was a new and wonderful challenge. I had always enjoyed the classes in Humphrey-Weidman technique at the New Dance Group, but the dance that Charles was remounting was quite different from the classroom studies that I had learned from Nona Shurman. Nona loved to move in large spatial patterns that coursed through the dance studio in combinations of evolving, open, lyric attitudes, or traversed the diagonal in rebounding, rhythmic phrases. Here we were dealing with Charles’s early explorations into his witty dramatic gesture language which he called “kinetic pantomime.”