Carla Maxwell, a dancer and choreographer who led the José Limón Dance Company for nearly 40 years, forging a path for how modern dance troupes can endure beyond the death of their founders, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her nephew, Omar Guerrero, confirmed her death, at a nursing home, but did not specify a cause.
When Ms. Maxwell became artistic director of the Limón company in 1977, few people expected her to last very long. Mr. Limón had died five years earlier, and no other major modern dance company had survived after its founder had died.
Like Martha Graham, Mr. Limón was the star dancer and principal choreographer of his namesake troupe. Appraisals after his death recalled the brooding charisma and moral certitude of his stage presence and ranked him as one of America’s greatest choreographers. What was the Limón company without its creator and guiding force?
“We not only had to prove that we could survive,” Ms. Maxwell said in an interview for the 2001 documentary “Limón: A Life Beyond Words.” “We had to prove that José’s work was worth maintaining.”
Ms. Maxwell, who had joined the company as a dancer in 1965, made her argument through action. Preserving company staples while also regularly reviving neglected or lost Limón works and importing and commissioning works by other choreographers, she attracted dancers, audiences and funders. This became a model for other companies, like Graham’s, after their founders died.
The inclusion of works by choreographers other than Mr. Limón was not a break with company history. Born in Mexico to parents who migrated to Los Angeles, Mr. Limón was the protégé of the choreographer Doris Humphrey, who, alongside Graham, had emerged from the school and company of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Mr. Limón became the lead male dancer of the company that Ms. Humphrey shared with Charles Weidman, and when he decided to found his own troupe, in 1946, he took the unusual step of asking Ms. Humphrey to serve as artistic director.
The Limón group performed both her works and his. After her death in 1958, Mr. Limón took over as director.
Ms. Maxwell first saw Mr. Limón perform in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College. “I was thunderstruck,” she said in an episode of the public television program “Eye on Dance” in 1982. “These were mature people onstage, not kids doing tricks.”
She was attracted to that maturity, and to Mr. Limón’s humanist ideals. “I try to compose works that are involved with man’s basic tragedy and grandeur of his spirit,” he wrote in a 1966 credo. He believed, he said, that “the artist’s function is perpetually to be the voice and conscience of his time.” Mr. Limón’s choreographic attention to architectural form and his dance technique, derived from Ms. Humphrey’s principles of weight, fall and recovery, also drew her.
After Ms. Maxwell’s first year at Juilliard, where Mr. Limón was on the faculty, he asked her to join his company. She excelled in roles like Emilia in “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Mr. Limón’s signature retelling of “Othello.” In a review in The New York Times, Don McDonagh noted “the genuine bite in her acid-etched rendering.”
In “Dances for Isadora,” Mr. Limón created the tempestuous solo “Maenad” for Ms. Maxwell. For his final work, “Carlota,” about the empress of Mexico, he gave Ms. Maxwell the title role. Clive Barnes, reviewing it in The New York Times, praised the “poignant madness” of her portrayal.
After Mr. Limón’s death, his company very well might have ended. “But there was the feeling that if we disbanded, these works would disappear,” Ms. Maxwell told “Eye on Dance.” Because little of his work had been filmed, she said, “it was only in our bodies.”
A State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union, booked before Mr. Limón’s death, helped keep the group together. Then Ruth Currier, a former member of the company, was asked by the dancers to become artistic director.
It was Ms. Currier who began importing work by other choreographers like Kurt Jooss and Murray Louis. When she resigned in the middle of 1977, Ms. Maxwell became acting artistic director; she officially took over in December 1978.
Through years when Mr. Limón’s gestural drama and earnest nobility seemed out of sync with contemporary attitudes and fashions, Ms. Maxwell stuck to her recipe. She framed restagings and reconstructions of the company’s repertoire with new pieces by the likes of Lar Lubovitch, Garth Fagan and Donald McKayle (who was resident choreographer in the late 1990s) and choreography by current and former company members, most notably Doug Varone and herself.
Continuing to perform until 2007, she attracted and nurtured several generations of dancers, among them Roxane D’Orléans Juste, Kristen Foote and Logan Frances Kruger.
Under Ms. Maxwell’s guidance, the company, which removed “José” from its name in the mid-1980s, celebrated its 40th-, 50th-, 60th- and 70th-anniversary seasons. When she retired in 2016, she was succeeded by a former company member, Colin Connor. Dante Puleio is the current director.
“There came a point, and it was pretty soon, when I had to say that I was not minding the store for somebody else,” Ms. Maxwell told The Times in 2003. “Would José like this? I don’t know. I hope so. I’m not doing it because I’m trying to please him. I’m trying to honor what I feel is the vision he set and see where it could go.”
Carla Lena Maxwell was born on Oct. 25, 1945, in Los Angeles. Her father, Robert Maxwell (born Max Rosen), was a classically trained prodigy on the harp whose renditions of his own pop and jazz arrangements made him one of the top supper-club attractions of the 1940s. Ms. Maxwell and her sister, Paula, joined their mother, Victoria, on their father’s frequent tours.
“I was a kind of trunk baby,” Ms. Maxwell said on “Eye on Dance.” “Until I was about 8, I didn’t know any other children except my sister.”
When Ms. Maxwell was 8, her family decided to settle down in Larchmont, NY. Her father channeled his energies into songwriting (“Ebb Tide” and “Shangri-La” were his biggest hits), dubbing harp for movie stars like Judy Garland (and, for one difficult piece, Harpo Marx) a and composing prolifically for television.
That same year, the Steffi Nossen School of Dance gave a class at Ms. Maxwell’s elementary school. “It was so exciting because we were flying around,” she told The Times in 1990. “It was something that felt natural. I got hooked.”
At the National Music Camp, she studied with Joe Gifford and Martha Whitman, who had worked with Doris Humphrey. She attended Bennington College in Vermont, which had a storied dance department, for one year and then transferred to Juilliard. She finished her studies while a member of the Limón company.
In 1969, when the Limón troupe was on a five-month break, Ms. Maxwell and her Limón colleague Clyde Morgan, her husband at the time, made a self-sponsored tour of Africa, performing works by Mr. Morgan. After she and Mr. Morgan divorced, Ms. Maxwell was briefly married to Frank Barth when he was the Limón company manager in the 1980s.
No immediate family members survive.
Ms. Maxwell was honored with a Dance Magazine Award in 1995 and a New York Dance and Performance Award, known as a Bessy, in 1998 for “finding a creative present in the context of a revered past.”
“Because the path was difficult and nothing was laid out, we had to find it ourselves,” she told The Times in 2003 of her mission with the Limón company. “I think we discovered that we were there for much more than José. Of course we loved him and his work, but there’s a whole aesthetic, a technique, a philosophy.”
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