Radiance and power

How her hometown became aware of Doris Humphrey is a story in itself. A contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway-and like Hemingway an Oak Park native-she was as influential as those titans in the field of modern dance.

Born on Oct. 17, 1895, she opened a dance school in Oak Park at the age of 18 to help support her struggling family. In 1917, the year Hemingway graduated from OPRF High School, Humphrey attended a summer program in Los Angeles offered by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, who recruited her for their Denishawn dance company.

In 1928, she formed her own dance troupe, the Humphrey-Weidman Group (with dance partner Charles Weidman), which lasted until 1944. She later directed the Jose Limon Dance Company, then taught in the Juilliard School dance department. In the process, she became renowned as much for her groundbreaking choreography as her dancing.

Doris Humphrey died on Dec. 29, 1958, the year before Wright’s and two years before Hemingway’s demise.

But it’s doubtful Oak Park would know much about, arguably, their most famous native daughter, if not for Stephanie Clemens, who was growing up in California at the time Humphrey was coming to the end of her long, distinguished career.

Clemens’ father was a portrait painter who had some pretty famous clients-Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, John and Ethel Barrymore, Katherine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn. He taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

As it happens, dancers from the Denishawn dance troupe also served as models at the institute. They would watch the young Stephanie, and Stephanie in turn got an education in dance by watching their rehearsals. She was also frequently taken to the Ruth St. Denis Studio, which was located near her father’s studio in Hollywood.

“I grew up with dancers in nautch skirts, saris and ankle bells,” she recalls.

And Clemens happened to be a student at the Juilliard School in ’58 when Humphrey died. She remembers attending a memorial performance of Humphrey’s masterpiece, Passacaglia, danced in her honor.

When Clemens moved to Oak Park in 1969 it wasn’t because of Doris Humphrey. Her husband, Jim Tenuta, was hired to teach at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Clemens didn’t even know Humphrey came from Oak Park when she started giving dance lessons.

“I started teaching in my living room in 1971-rolled up the rug,” she recalls.

Eventually she took over the remaining portion of the old Bishop Quarter Military Academy at East and Lake (including the gym which now serves as their performance space), which became the home of the Academy of Movement and Music.

As her pupils grew older, Clemens founded MOMENTA, a professional dance troupe for her alums and advanced students. In 1988, her husband, a co-founder of the troupe, suggest they put on a “Doris Humphrey Festival.”

“He knew she had been born here, and he saw all the publicity surrounding Wright and Hemingway,” Clemens recalls.

She wasn’t sure they were equipped for such an undertaking, but she made a connection with Eleanor King and Ernestine Stodelle, who had danced with, or for Humphrey and helped Clemens recreate the choreography largely from their own memories.

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In the ensuing years, MOMENTA and Clemens have not only performed Humphrey’s dances, they’ve also put together six “coaching” videos-on five of her major works plus one on Humphrey’s dance techniques-with a seventh in the works.

With the aid of Humphrey’s son, Charles Humphrey Woodford, they have accumulated a collection of photos and original, mint-condition Denishawn dance programs from the 1920s. More photos were added earlier this year, purchased from the estate of Jack Cole.

Gradually they have built a respectable archive, overseen by the Doris Humphrey Society, which Clemens created for that purpose, but they don’t have the proper facilities for storing that level of legacy.

The new Oak Park Public Library building has an archive room, but it is largely devoted to the Hemingway Foundation’s collection, and wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.

Chicago’s Newberry Library, on the other hand, boasts probably the best dance collection in the country, Clemens says, in a climate-controlled setting. They offer the added benefit of allowing the Doris Humphrey Society to maintain ownership of all the materials.

Which is why, at last August’s Humphrey Society board meeting, the decision was made to store the Humphrey archive at Newberry Library. Newberry’s board, in turn, voted last week to accept the collection. As soon as they can get all the photos digitized, Clemens says, materials will be available online at www.newberrry.org/collections/danceabstracts.html.

“It feels good,” says Clemens. “When you’re passionate about your mission, it feels good when you’ve carried it out.”

Meanwhile, her dance enterprise continues to look ahead and break new ground. MOMENTA has, in recent years, begun to add a specialization in dancers with disabilities.

Kris Lenzo, an Oak Park resident confined to a wheelchair since losing his legs in an accident in his youth, has become a member of the performing troupe and Clemens is taking advantage of the growing body of choreographic work devoted to the disabled. Lenzo will perform in the upcoming November program.

Richard Bailey, a local resident who suffers from Parkinson’s tremors, will perform as well. Bailey takes dance classes with MOMENTA alum Sarah Cullen Fuller.

“When he is moving to music,” Clemens says, “all the shaking in his hands stops.”

MOMENTA’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Dance St. Louis, which will hold Spring to Dance Festival 2009, has asked Lenzo and MOMENTA veteran Sandra Kaufmann (who also heads the dance department at Loyola University) to recreate “Ashes.” Clemens calls the invitation a great honor.

When they started performing Humphrey’s works in 1988, Clemens recalls, “I was concerned that our young company could not do her works justice, so we started with some of the smaller, earlier works.” This past spring, for their 20th anniversary, Clemens finally felt they had the experience and resources to tackle Humphrey’s masterwork Passacaglia and Fugue.

“Doing Passacaglia is a measure of how much MOMENTA has grown in 20 years,” says Clemens.

It was so successful, the piece will be part of the senior company program which takes place Nov. 1, 2, 8 and 9 at the Academy of Movement and Music’s Doris Humphrey Memorial Theatre, 605 Lake St. Performances start at 8 p.m. on the two Saturdays and 7 p.m. on Sundays. Tickets are $20/adults, $10/seniors, and $5/students. Call 848-2329.

Other works featured will be “Flickers,” based on the 1941 parody of the silent film era by Humphrey’s partner, Charles Weidman. The work will be portrayed in four “reels,” each recalling the style of early silent film stars like Lillian Gish and Rudolph Valentino. Clemens notes that Weidman’s choreography is a lot more humorous than Humphrey’s more serious, abstract work, so they complemented one another.

Isadora Duncan’s “Cherubim” will also be on the program along with original choreography by three OPRF High School students.

My dance is an art concerned with human values. It upholds only those which make for harmony and opposes all forces inimical to those values. In part its movement may be used for decoration, entertainment, emotional release or technical display, but primarily it is composed as an expression of American life as I see it today.

This new dance of action comes inevitably from the people who had to subdue a continent, to make a thousand paths through forest and plain, to conquer the mountains and eventually to raise up towers of steel and glass. The American dance is born of this new world, new life and new vigor.

I believe that the dancer belongs to his time and place and that he can only express that which passes through or close to his experience. The one indispensable quality in a work of art is a consistent point of view related to the times, and when this is lost and there is substituted for it an aptitude for putting together bits of this and that drawn from extraneous material and dead methods, there can be no integrity.

Since my dance is concerned with immediate human values, my basic technique lies in the natural movements of the body. One cannot express contemporary life without humanizing movement, as distinguished from dehumanization of the ballet. The modern dancer must come down from the points to the bare foot in order to establish his human relation to gravity and reality.

I wish my dance to reflect some experience of my own in relationship to the outside world: to be based on reality illumined by imagination; to be organic rather than synthetic; to call forth a definite reaction from my audience; and to make its contribution toward the drama of life.

-Doris Humphrey