Doris Humphrey's Day on Earth is for me one of the absolute pinnacles of American Modern Dance.
From my very first viewing on film in the Dance Collection of the NY Public Library (now the Jerome Robbins Dance Division), more than anything I wanted to dance the role of The Man in this 26-minute choreographic juwel.
The solo of The Man, opening the work, is a gem; but so are the roles of The Young Girl and The Woman, physically and dramatically all highly demanding, all deeply satisfying to perform, while, of course, the role of The Child steals the show!
The Man is a one-of-a-kind portrait, unifying farm work related movement with psychological drama, a highly original dance language I've never seen anywhere else.
Near the end, confronted with his wife's death, The Man's rage and despair transforms his work related movement into searing dramatic dance gesture, showing once more the master hand of the choreographer.
After a performance in a rural part of Holland, a middle aged man came up to me; he was a farmer, he told me, and had recently lost his wife; both work-wise and in his despair, he'd found himself mirrored in The Man, and thanked me with tears in his throat for the deep emotion my dancing had stirred in him.
Another unique trait is the lifespan of The Man, from young to old age.
I learned the role when I was 35, and I envisioned him, at the opening of the piece standing upstage left to begin his solo along a diagonal path to downstage right, to be 16,
and towards the end, standing near that same spot, when in three stumbling steps death pulls him backwards, to be 74.
...those three steps...
At 35 I found them the most difficult of all; just three bare, simple steps falling backwards were all Humphrey gave the dancer, no more.
One late night I went back to the studio and rehearsed by myself till early morning, till I was so tired, all I could do was fall back...the next day in rehearsal they finally worked.
I'm 74 now.
How dear and near these moves feel...
In her beautiful biography Days on Earth, the Dance of Doris Humphrey, Marcia B. Siegel writes on Day on Earth:
Aaron Copland's 1941 Piano Sonata was a complex piece (...). To Copland's rhythmic dissonances Doris set a simple, almost abstract character study of a man who works, two women he loves, and his child. (...) Day on Earth seems free of all pettiness or ego and somehow pertinent to the experience of every viewer. John Martin said it was "almost as if she had looked from some other planet and seen things telescoped into a simple, arduous pattern of dignity and beauty."
The whole dance seems less a celebration than a resigned acceptance of whatever is inevitable: work, love, pain, and rebirth.
After seeing a performance Eleanor King wrote Doris that it was "the most perfect work of dance I ever experienced."
