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Studying Water Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Sheila Marion
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Water Study, choreographed by Doris Humphrey in 1928, is described by dance writer Marcia B. Siegel as “still one of the most extraordinary works in American dance.” One of Humphrey's earliest works, it was created during the period in which American modern dancers Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Martha Graham broke away from the ersatz ethnicity of Denishawn to begin choreographing their own works. “As small and strange as it is,” Siegel continues, “Water Study is a masterpiece of the choreographic art”.

The piece begins with ten to twelve dancers crouched low on the floor, scattered throughout the stage area, and all facing stage right. They slowly rise and sink in canon, as though a wave passed over them and back again. The movement grows until it brings them onto their feet: they separate and rush toward one another, leaping and falling like waves splashing together and subsiding. Then, grouped together, they surge back and forth from one side of the stage to the other like shifting tides. One cluster of dancers breaks away while another leaps, turns, and falls, forming a progressive, whirl-pool-like spiral to the floor. A side-to-side rocking motion gradually brings the dancers into unison as they spread throughout the stage area again. They return to the crouching position and ripple upward again in one last splash before finishing with a slow crawling action that leaves them prone like the last remnant of a wave creeping up the shore.

Water Study focuses attention on movement by minimizing other theatrical elements. The dance does not tell a story; it is performed in silence with no scenery; lighting changes are minimal; and dancers are costumed in plain, flesh-colored leotards. Although these kinds of choices tell their own story, as will be examined later, they serve to “turn the volume up” on the movement “channel” of communication.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1992 , pp. 1 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1992

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References

NOTES

1. Siegel, Marcia B., The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 27Google Scholar.

2. “We believe the original costumes were flesh colored,” states a fact sheet on staging information from the Dance Notation Bureau, “but many productions have used colors of blue-green or gray.”

3. Siegel, p. 29.

4. Jowitt, Deborah, Time and the Dancing Image (New York: William Morrow, 1988), p. 196Google Scholar.

5. Davis, Martha Ann and Schmais, Claire, “An Analysis of the Style and Composition of ‘Water Study,’” Research in Dance: Problems and Possibilities (CORD Dance Research Annual I, 1967), p. 105Google Scholar.

6. Rodiger, Ann L., “Dance Graph Analysis,” Dance Notation Journal (Vol. I, no. 2, Fall 1983), p. 21Google Scholar.

7. Siegel, p. xv.

8. Davis and Schmais, p. 105.

9. Rodiger, p. 22.

10. Siegel explains the paradigms underpinning her historical categorizations in the introduction to The Shapes of Change, but not the methods of analysis that inform her descriptions.

11. Bartenieff, Irmgard, “Effort/Shape in Teaching Ethnic Dance,” New Dimensions in Dance Research: Anthropology and Dance—The American Indian (CORD Research Annual VI, 1972), p. 176Google Scholar.

12. Rodiger, p. 23.

13. Davis and Schmais, p. 105.

14. Rodiger, p. 23.

15. Ibid., p. 24.

16. Ibid., p. 28.

17. Ibid., p. 26.

18. Davis and Schmais, p. 106.

19. Ibid., p. 107.

20. Ibid., p. 111.

21. I agree with Rodiger that the pattern is not exactly symmetrical. If the spiral to the floor is taken as the main climax of the dance, then the resolution happens in a briefer time span than the buildup. Support for this view can be found in Humphrey's words: “nature moves in succession … usually in an unfolding succession to a climax, and a more sudden succession to cessation or death” (quoted in Siegel, Marcia B., Days on Earth: The Dance of Doris Humphrey [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987], p. 86)Google Scholar.

22. Davis and Schmais, pp. 111-112.

23. Siegel, , Days on Earth, p. 87Google Scholar.

24. Siegel, , The Shapes of Change, p. 32Google Scholar.

25. Geertz, Clifford, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3–30Google Scholar.

26. The notated score Davis and Schmais probably used was the Ruth Currier version, reconstructed in 1966. In addition, Claire Schmais had performed in a reconstruction of the work. The introduction to the published score of Water Study states: “Ruth Currier directed the revival of Water Study aided by notes made in Labanotation by Barbara Hoenig, by Sally Fan Hanger who danced in the 1954 revival by Miss Humphrey at Connecticut College School of Dance, and from her own memory as she assisted Miss Humphrey with the repertory class that summer… Since the 1966 notation, another complete revival was mounted by Ernestine Stodelle, and is in the process of notation in 1978” (Doris Humphrey: The Collected Works, Vol. I [New York: Dance Notation Bureau Press, 1978], p. 5)Google Scholar. Siegel saw a reconstruction by Stodelle. The two versions vary principally in the arm movements for the final diagonal cross and the placement of the spiral.

27. Siegel, , The Shapes of Change, p. 29Google Scholar.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., p. 30.

30. Ibid.

31. “Water Study” Doris Humphrey: The Collected Works, Vol. I (New York: Dance Notation Bureau Press, 1978), p. 4Google Scholar.

32. Siegel, , The Shapes of Change, p. 31Google Scholar.

33. Siegel, , Days on Earth, p. 87Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., p. 88.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 89.

37. von Laban, Rudolf, Choreographie, (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1926), p. 15Google Scholar; quoted in Maletic, Vera, Body-Space-Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban's Movement and Dance Concepts (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987), p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Maletic, p. 65.

39. Ibid.

40. Davis and Schmais, p. 107.

41. Davis now refers to this as the symptomatic potential of movement, in which certain movement patterns are symptoms of states and so have a direct (not external) relationship to those states (Davis, personal communication, 1988).

42. Davis, Martha, Towards Understanding the Intrinsic in Body Movement (New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 81–82Google Scholar. Davis, cites Kestenberg, et al. , “Development of the Young Child as Expressed Through Bodily Movement,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Vol. 19, 1971), p. 747Google Scholar; and Reich, Wilhelm, Character Analysis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (The Noonday Press, 1949), p. 358Google Scholar.

43. Maletic, p. 73.

44. See Shawn, Ted, Every Little Movement (New York: Dance Horizons, 1974)Google Scholar and Stebbins, Genevieve, The Delsarte System of Expression (New York: Dance Horizons, 1977)Google Scholar.

45. Davis and Schmais, p. 112.

46. Siegel, , Days on Earth, p. 87Google Scholar.

47. Jowitt, p. 196.

48. Foster, Susan Leigh, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 65, 235Google Scholar.

49. Siegel, , The Shapes of Change, p. 28Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., p. 29.

51. Siegel, , Days on Earth, p. 86Google Scholar.

52. Siegel, , The Shapes of Change, p. 23Google Scholar.

53. Jowitt, Deborah, “New Faces, Old Pros,” Village Voice (April 4, 1968), p. 29Google Scholar.

54. Jowitt, , Time and the Dancing Image, p. 180Google Scholar.

55. Ibid., p. 184.

56. Ibid., p. 191.

57. Charles H. Woodford, “Open Letter to Reconstructors of the Works of Doris Humphrey on her 90th Birthday.” Dance Notation Bureau Library, New York, c. 1985.

58. Jowitt, , Time and the Dancing Image, p. 193Google Scholar.

59. Ibid., p. 197.

60. I watched a videotape of a film from the Dance Notation Bureau. While the DNB librarian was unable to identify the date of the film, notator Leslie Rotman said it was the Ruth Currier version of the dance. As it was an older film, it may have been the version filmed in 1966.