LIMÓN DANCE COMPANY
DANCE
At the Joyce: Limón’s Legacy, Queer Resonance, and the Pulse of NYC
Limón Dance Company. Chaconne. Frances Samson, Savannah Spratt, Joey Columbus, Lauren Twomley, Natalie Clevenger. Photo by Hisae Aihara.
On a crisp October evening, Limón Dance Company returned to the Joyce Theater, reaffirming its role as one of New York City’s vital cultural anchors. For those of us at TMN®, the Joyce isn’t just a venue—it’s an essential part of the city’s living education in movement, discipline, and imagination. Since 1982, this space in Chelsea has nurtured modern dance as a dialogue between past and present, between risk and tradition. To witness Limón here is to experience New York’s cultural pulse at its most articulate: grounded in history, yet unafraid to evolve.
NEW YORK CITY, By Pablo Herrera
The evening opened with “Chaconne,” José Limón’s 1942 distillation of grace and gravity, set to Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor and accompanied live by violinist John Marcus. Performed with extraordinary restraint and precision, the piece felt like a study in emotional architecture—each gesture calibrated, each pause weighted with purpose. The choreography’s simplicity became its power: the body as vessel for a music older than itself. In those moments of suspended stillness, the Joyce fell utterly silent—an audience listening not only with their ears but with their collective breath.
Limón Dance Company. Chaconne. Photo by Hisae Aihara.
Next came “The Emperor Jones,” originally choreographed by Limón in 1956 and newly reconstructed by artistic director Dante Puleio for this season. Inspired by Eugene O’Neill’s play, the work follows a man consumed by authority and haunted by his own conscience. In this revival, Johnson Guo embodied the Emperor with haunting control—a portrait of collapse rendered through motion. Around him, the ensemble became the echo of his unraveling psyche, their synchronized movements transforming inner turmoil into collective rhythm. The lighting by Corey Whitmore and scenic design by Peta McKenna turned the stage into a shifting psychological landscape—one where shadows carried as much meaning as the dancers themselves.
Limón Dance Company. The Emperor Jones. Photo by Hisae Aihara.
The program concluded with “Jamelgos,” a World Premiere by Diego Vega Solorza—like Limón himself, born in Culiacán, Sinaloa. This shared origin lent the evening a subtle but profound symmetry: a return to roots that now speak in a new language. Set to a score by Ebe Oke, Vega Solorza’s work emerged as a manifesto of softness and defiance. “Our rebellion is softness itself—vulnerability that sparks the fire,” he writes, and onstage, that vulnerability became palpable. The choreography unfolded as an act of resistance through tenderness—queer, Latinx, and fiercely contemporary. The dancers’ bodies seemed to converse across generations, tracing invisible lines from Limón’s expressive physicality to the emotional honesty of the present.
Limón Dance Company, Jamelgos. Johnson Guo, Natalie Clevenger. Photo by Hisae Aihara.
Leaving the Joyce that night, one felt both expanded and grounded. The performance didn’t offer spectacle or closure—it offered resonance. In the flicker of the lobby lights and the city’s hum outside, there was a sense that art, when truthful, reshapes the air around it.
For TMN®, being part of New York’s cultural ecosystem means exactly this: engaging with art not as distant observers but as active participants in its living continuum. Every show we attend, every story we tell, becomes part of a shared education—a way of learning from the past to imagine what’s next.
To the young creators reading this: go to The Joyce. Sit in that theater. Let movement teach you about courage, empathy, and time. Let it remind you that culture isn’t static—it’s something we build together, night after night, city after city, dance after dance.
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