The dance begins with a striking portrayal of a tyrant’s outsized ego — jaw thrust arrogantly forward, legs splayed in an extreme example of man-spreading, chest puffed out.
This is Emperor Jones, the lead character in José Limón’s 1956 dance. Limón based his work on Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, one of his earliest experiments in anti-realism, and one of the first American plays with a complex Black protagonist.
“There is something not altogether ridiculous about his grandeur,” O’Neill wrote of Emperor Jones, a Pullman porter who kills a man and flees to a Caribbean island where he manipulates the local population into making him Emperor. “He has a way of carrying it off.”
Limón’s dance captures these qualities: the effort to intimidate that does not quite succeed, the tinseled grandeur. Limón, a Mexican-born American modern choreographer and dancer, cast himself in the title role. (A film of that performance can be found online.)
At a recent rehearsal of the Limón Dance Company, with Johnson Guo in the lead, the character felt strangely familiar, less like fiction and more like a commentary on the present day. Dante Puleio, the company’s director, agreed. “The original story is about an escaped convict,” he said in an interview, “a felon who becomes a tyrannical leader.”
About a year and a half ago, Puleio considered reviving the work. “I didn’t feel the imagination had to go far to draw a contemporary parallel to that reality.” “The Emperor Jones” will be performed as part of the company’s 80th anniversary season at the Joyce Theater (Oct. 14-19), which also includes a world premiere by the Mexican choreographer Diego Vega Solorza.
For years, “The Emperor Jones” has been something of a problem piece. (This is only the third revival.) Its highly emphatic gestural language, exotic locale — “an island domain,” according to the old program notes — and depiction of voodoo ritual seemed stuck in an earlier, heavily symbolic era of modern dance, an era less sensitive about cultural stereotyping.
Limón originally performed the role with skin-darkening makeup; after his death, in 1972, it was passed on to Clay Taliaferro, a Black dancer. When it was last revived, in 2011, the Colombian-born Daniel Fetecua-Soto played the role without makeup. Over time the company’s casting has become less rigid, and the racial component of “The Emperor Jones” is now less pronounced. In the original staging, Jones’s nemesis was “The White Man”; now he is simply “The Man in White.”
But Limón’s personal experience is still ingrained in the work. In an interview, Fetecua-Soto, who is coaching the revival, talked about Limón’s memories of the Mexican Revolution, in which an uncle was shot in front of him. Fetecua-Soto related Limón’s depiction of a petty tyrant to figures from the not-so-distant past, like the Colombian dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who liked to wear a chest-full of medals.
“I too grew up in a country that has gone through difficult things and atrocities,” he said, “and I can understand what Limón was trying to do in his work.”
This is not a simple revival, but a reimagining of the dance. Puleio saw it as an opportunity to rethink and recontextualize the story for a new audience. “For the piece to speak to the moment,” he said, “we had to look at how the work fit in today’s climate.”
With help from the dramaturg and theater director Dominique Rider, Puleio changed the era to an approximation of the present day and replaced its tropical setting with an urban one in which capitalism creates an oppressive frame. The jungle fronds have become panels covered in graffiti-like stock market symbols and words like “crypto” and “money,” and the costumes have been simplified and updated. Gone are the epaulets and medals of the tropical-island dictator. A voodoo mask has been replaced by a fractured mirror. (The pistol, dangling against the Emperor’s thigh, has stayed.)
The choreography hasn’t changed, but the context has. The changes are “about the how and the why” of the action, Rider said.
Each of the dance’s episodes, representing the Emperor’s memories as he flees an uprising, has been slightly recast. Scenes depicting a slave auction and chain gang become metaphors for “the tragedy of the modern worker,” Rider said. The ensemble, formerly all men, now includes women.
Puleio has also brought out the subtext in the relationship between the title character and his nemesis. “The Emperor Jones” is one of a handful of Limón dances centered on two opposed male characters, including “The Traitor,” inspired by Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus, and the more often performed “Moor’s Pavane,” based on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” about the manipulation of Othello by his friend and confidant, Iago.
The relationships between the adversaries in these dances are fraught with tension and characterized by extreme physical closeness. Many, including Puleio, perceive a powerful homoerotic charge. “I can see it in the partnering and the really intense passion between the two men,” Puleio said. “There is so much charged electricity there.”
In earlier revivals, including in 2011, this aspect of the story went unexamined. Fetecua-Soto did not consider it part of the character’s story when he performed it. “I didn’t see any eroticism,” he said. “For me it is really about power.” But Puleio, who performed a secondary role in that production, said, “we dancers kept remarking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they’re doing that.’”
In one scene, the Man in White climbs onto the throne and stands directly in front of the seated Jones, his pelvis at face level; in another, as Jones lies on the ground, legs up in a V shape, the other man steps between his legs and lingers there for a moment.
“It’s definitely there,” Norton Owen, who was the director of the Limón Institute for over a decade, said about the sexual implications. “But it wasn’t discussed.” Limón was married to a woman but also had homosexual relationships. They were never acknowledged publicly and are still written about only sparingly.
Instead, Limón, in his life as in his work, maintained an aura of quasi-heroic masculinity. He stood apart from the early modern choreographers, who were mostly women, by declaring that “a man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance.” But he kept his personal experiences and desires to himself.
Puleio sees in Limón’s discretion and ability to, as he put it, “code switch,” one of his great strengths. “He was smart in knowing how to be subversive,” he said. “He wasn’t militant in his politics, but he knew how to say what he wanted to say.”
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