Doris Humphrey on Basic Principles. From The art of making dances.

Aprovechando el raite de oferta sobre danza en la red, te comparto un texto de Doris Humphrey. 
Seguramente habrás escuchado alguna de estas frases en voz de tus profes de danza, pues independientemente de la técnica con la que trabajes, hay principios universales que compartimos o aplicamos todos en la danza contemporánea.

 Chécate como lo escribió la coreógrafa estadounidense nacida en 1895, quien luego de estudiar con Miss Ruth St. Dennis y Ted Shawn, bailó con la compañía Denishawn y en 1929 inició junto a Charles Weidman su propio grupo de danza. A partir de 1946 y hasta 1957 fue directora artística de la José Limón Company, coordinó e impartió cursos de verano en el Bennington College y en el Connecticut College. Fue además,  miembro fundador de la Julliard School of Dance y directora de The Julliard Dance Theatre. Su libro "The art of making dances" publicado en 1959 sigue siendo un "must" para todo estudiante/profesional en la danza contemporánea. Si entrenas o estudias con Técnica Limón o alguna de las técnicas mixtas que integre elementos de la Técnica Humphrey-Limón, te resultará familiar el texto.

On Basic principles. 
Como aparece en: Anderson, Jack. Ballet & Modern dance, Pennington, NJ. 1992, Princeton Book Company/Dance Horizons. pp. 197-198.

           In the human animal, the walk is the key pattern of fall and recovery, my theory of motion–that is, the giving in to and rebound from gravity. This is the very core of all movement, in my opinion. All life fluctuates between the resistance to and the yielding to gravity. Youth is "down" as little as posible; gravity holds him lightly to earth. Old age gradually takes over and the spring vanishes from the step until the final yielding, death. There are two still points in the physical life: the motionless body, in which the thousand adjustments for keeping it erect are invisible, and the horizontal, the last stillness. Life and dance exists between these two points and therefore form the arc between two deaths. This lifetime span is fill with thousands of falls and recoveries– all highly specialized and exaggerated in the dance–which result in accents of all qualities and timings. If these movements, specially of the feet, augmented by other parts of the body, are organized into rhythmic patterns, they are connected as by umbilical cord to everybody's life...
          A movement without motivation is unthinkable. Some force is the cause for change of position, whether it is understandable or not. This applies not just to dancing, but to the physical world in general. Choreographers can and do ignore motivation, making no explanation to themselves or others, but try as they may to be abstract, they cannot avoid saying, "I live, therefore I move!" The cessation of movement is death, but before that a dancer at least makes the minimal statement, "I am a live human being". The only way I can think of to avoid this is to encase the body in a sort of box costume in which no part of the anatomy shows, and nothing reveals a living muscle underneath. Anybody want to tray this? It might really be an abstraction, as it would be cause for conjecture whether a human being inhabited the outfit, or a mechanism. Even here motivation is at work; someone must have been inspired to invent the mechanism.

         Obviously I am for conscious motivation, and therefore in favor of communication about people to people. I insist from the beginning of class work, and with no professional dancers too, that movement should be supported by a purpose, even that no move be made until a reason, simple as it may be, demands it.

Humphrey, Doris. The art of making dances. New York: Rinehart, 1959. Princeton, N.J. A Dance Horizons Book/Princeton Book Company, 1990, pp. 106-110.

Puedes consultar el libro en físico visitando la biblioteca de Humanidades de la Unison, también lo encuentras en Amazon USA.