The dances of Doris Humphrey: creating a contemporary perspective through interpretation

The focus of this article is on interpretive strategies developed to enable modern dance production to move beyond existing practices in dance reconstruction. The article takes up and rearticulates, for a different audience/ readership, some of the enquiries established in the restaging for Arke Dance Theatre: in further pursuing those enquiries and resulting observations discursively, however, and in its ability to set to one side some of the necessary compromises imposed on an ongoing research enquiry by the imperatives specific to creative and professional production, it arrives at a differently developed set of reflections on ""history"", ""reconstruction"" and ""the new"", and formulates and emphasises these differently. The article was the first relating to Doris Humphrey's work and the problems of reconstruction and new authorship, to be published in Dance Research. The article was further disseminated and discussed in detail by Charles H.Woodford (Humphrey's son) at the Humphrey Symposium in Massachusetts, USA in August, 2006.

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