The Doris Humphrey Society now has their own homepage with stories and pictures
of the life of Doris Humphrey, including an upcoming Online Store.
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I was born October 17, 1895, at 315 North Grove Avenue, in a sleepy little town called Oak Park. My father's family had lived in Oak Park for some time -- Humphrey Avenue was named after my grandpa, Simon, who was a Congregational Minister. Daddy used to work for the Oak Leaves as a free-lance photographer.
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Things changed when I was just a kid -- my father became proprietor of the Palace Hotel in Chicago, and my mother supervised the staff. You can't image what it was like for a young girl to grow up in that fine setting. I was a member of the first graduating class of the Francis Parker School, located in the future Playboy Mansion. My inspiration was my dance teacher at Parker School, Ms. Mary Wood Hinman.
Dancing was my future. After graduating in 1913, I went to New York City and studied for a brief while with Irene and Vernon Castle. My return to Oak Park after this led to opening the Humphrey School of Dance, where my mother would play while I taught the children in town the joys of dancing, and adults its social pleasures. Enough was enough, though, so in 1917 I went west to Los Angeles to study with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. I joined the Denishawn Company in 1918, and became the principal dancer, teacher and co-choreographer with St. Denis.
After ten years with Denishawn, touring America and the Orient, I teamed with Charles Wideman to become a pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement, and an innovator in technique, choreography, and theory of dance movement. One of my joys was to be an inspiration to the generations of modern dance choreographers, including my superb student José Limón. Several of my works are still in the repetoire of the company that he later founded.
I settled down to teaching at Bennington College, and became one of the founders in 1951 of the Dance Department at the Juilliard School of Music. I died December 29, 1958, and today you can visit my spirit in the Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois.
"Humphrey studied many kinds of dance in Chicago and in 1917 entered the Denishawn School in Los Angeles. The following year she joined the Denishawn company and became one of its leading dancers. After choreographing several of her own solos she became choreographic assistant to Ruth St. Denis. She created her first group work in 1925 to Edward MacDowell's Sonata Tragica. Although similar in form to St. Denis' music visualizations, Sonata Tragica possessed such strong choreographic rhythms that St. Denis later presented it as the first American modern dance performed without music. Dissatisfied with choreography dictated by music and with the foreign dance styles emphasized at Denishawn, Humphrey left the company in the late 1920s with another Denishawn dancer, Charles Weidman. Together they founded the Humphrey-Weidman school and company, which was active until 1944; Sybil Shearer, Katherine Litz, and José Limón were among the more famous members of their company."
For more discussion, see the full Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on my life.
Or, go to your public library and check out
Or better yet, do an Alta Vista search on my name or for my students:
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URL for this page: http://oprf.com/Humphrey/ Comments to opt@oprf.com. -- Last updated May 12, 1998 Copyright © 1996 Steven Hurder, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED |