An exuberant revival

To exuberant bursts of music by Zoltan Kodaly, waves of CalArts dancers cross and recross a rehearsal studio under the watchful eye of Carla Maxwell, artistic director of the Jose Limon Dance Company.

Maxwell is looking for students to join the troupe for three weeks to prepare for a revival of Limon’s 1958 “Missa Brevis,” this weekend at the Ahmanson Theatre. The company has 13 dancers; the piece requires 22. Maxwell isn’t necessarily looking for a perfect Limon dancer. “We’re not expecting them in just five minutes to be able to do that,” she says. She’s looking for those who have a “fervor and intention that’s going to shine and speak.

“Ultimately, that will communicate the ideas better than someone who’s doing the form and is blank.”

Never was Limon, who died in 1972, interested in blank forms. He wanted to communicate universal human truths.

“We want to use the human body to speak of the dignity of man,” he says in Malachi Roth’s 2001 documentary “Limon: A Life Beyond Words.” “That is what motivates me.”

The dancer fought all his life to embody that dignity.

Jose Arcadio Limon was born in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico, in 1908, the eldest of 12 children. After the Mexican revolution, his family immigrated to the United States when he was 7. When his mother died in childbirth shortly after, he bitterly blamed his father, who was crushed by the news.

“I took a terrible and heartless revenge,” he says in Roth’s film. He told his father, “You killed her, and God permitted it.”

The two would not reconcile for years.

Limon left for New York in 1928, after a year at UCLA as an art major, to become a painter. But he discovered that El Greco had done everything he hoped to accomplish. Feeling he had lost his life’s purpose, he happened on a concert by German modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg.

“It was the moment of my rebirth,” he wrote in an unfinished autobiography. “ ‘My God,’ I said to the girl who was with me, ‘Where has this been all my life?’ This is what I’ve always wanted to do. I did not know it.”

He studied with modern dance pioneers Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, joining their company and staying for 10 years. When World War II broke out, he served for three years in the Army. After his discharge, he formed his own company with Humphrey in 1946. (The weekend program also includes his homage to Humphrey, “A Choreographic Offering.”)

Emerging as a performer with towering presence and astonishing control, Limon created nearly 100 dances in his career. But most of them are lost.

“We only have some form of record for 22 of those dances,” Maxwell says. “But there’s no missing elements in ‘Missa Brevis.’ ”

In addition to several films of the original, she says, “This was also the first dance I learned 40 years ago when I joined the company, and I’ve danced it many, many times.”

The piece was created after Limon returned from a European tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department. He saw Poland in ruins, but he found the people unbowed.

“These people are vital and undefeated,” he wrote. “They are without rancor, without hatred. They have a heroic serenity. I found it inspiring. I’m going to do a dance about it.”

Danced to Kodaly’s 1945 Missa Brevis and premiered in a bombed-out church in Budapest, “Missa,” like all of the choreographer’s work, has a philosophical underpinning and a deep moral concern, as well as a compelling visceral component.

“In all of Limon’s big group works,” says Maxwell, “there is the idea that the community comes first and the solo figure emerges out of it and can be absorbed back into it.”

One has to be “willing, able and ready” to be part of a community, she says.

It’s that feeling of community that kept the company going after Limon’s death -- long enough to celebrate its 60th anniversary in January.

“One of the amazing things is, out of those 60 years, Jose was only there for the first 26,” says Maxwell, who took over in 1978. “We’ve gone on 34 years without him.”

She credits her predecessor, Ruth Currier, one of the four original company members, with holding things together.

“Ruth Currier’s never really been given the credit she deserves. She was really the one who took over the company nine months after Jose died. She was the one who built the first board of directors. She was the one who looked at what we were and said, ‘This concept can expand,’ and started inviting other choreographers in.”

But Limon always had a broad, inclusive view.

“He was the only artist of his generation to ask someone else to be his artistic director, and that was, of course, Doris Humphrey, his teacher and mentor,” Maxwell says.

“At that time, when you started a company, you were everything. But it wasn’t just his works. From the beginning it was a repertory company and he presented works by his dancers.

“He was a very generous man, with a very open mind. Even though he was fighting for his work, he was really fighting for the American modern dance.”

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Jose Limon Dance Company

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

Price: $20 to $75

Contact: (213) 365-3500; www.musiccenter.org/dance.html