Working With The Art Of Making Dances
I picked up Doris Humphrey's book about five years ago when I was trying to figure out how to structure a choreographic piece that didn't feel like a series of unrelated sections held together by theme music. It turned out to be one of the more useful texts on the shelf, though it wasn't immediately obvious why when I first read it. The concepts are there, but they're presented as observations from a working choreographer rather than a step-by-step manual. You have to do some of the work yourself.Doris Humphrey The Art Of Making Dances
The core framework revolves around what she calls the "fall and recovery" principle — the idea that any movement originates from a shift of weight away from equilibrium and the subsequent effort to return to it. It sounds almost too simple when you read it on paper. The real value comes in how she then extends that single biomechanical truth into a full language for structuring a piece. Balance, danger, rhythm, phrasing, spatial design — all of it traces back to that initial impulse of leaving support and coming back. When I first tried applying it, I ran into a problem that took me months to untangle. I was choreographing a duet where both dancers were moving through the same phrases simultaneously, expecting the counterpoint to create visual interest. It just looked messy. What I didn't realize until I went back to the text was that Humphrey specifically addresses this — she writes about the difference between simultaneous movement and contrapuntal movement, and how they create entirely different effects. Simultaneous movement unifies. Contrapuntal movement differentiates. I had been using simultaneous movement and expecting a contrapuntal result. The fix was straightforward once I understood the distinction: I shifted one dancer to a complementary phrase structure instead of the identical one, and suddenly the piece had dimension instead of just volume. Another thing the book gets right that most choreography pedagogy ignores is the treatment of silence as a structural element. Not musical silence — actual kinetic silence, where a dancer holds or stills without it functioning as a dramatic pause. Humphrey treats these moments as legitimate rhythmic units, equal in weight to active movement. Beginners tend to fill every gap. It's a mistake. A three-second stillness in the middle of a fast section does more work than three seconds of added movement usually would, and it costs nothing in terms of staging or rehearsal time.
How The Framework Actually Works In Practice
The book is organized around several key operations: creating movement material, developing motifs, structuring sequences, designing formation patterns, and shaping the overall arc of a piece. Each section builds on the last, but the relationships aren't strictly linear. You'll find yourself jumping between chapters depending on what problem you're currently stuck on. That's intentional. Humphrey wrote this as a choreographer, not a textbook author, and the structure reflects the way you actually think while making work. One advanced technique she describes that isn't widely taught involves the manipulation of "directional tension" — the way a dancer's orientation creates an implicit narrative pull even before any story is attached. A dancer facing stage left carries different expectations than one facing audience left, even if the physical movement is identical. This matters especially in ensemble work where multiple bodies share the stage. I found that adjusting directional choices alone could resolve composition problems that I'd previously tried to fix by adding or subtracting movement. It cut my rehearsal time significantly on pieces where the body count was six or higher. There's a section on rhythm that deserves more attention than it gets. Humphrey distinguishes between metrical rhythm (the predictable pulse) and phrasal rhythm (the natural flow of movement regardless of beat). Most dance students are trained to move in metrical rhythm because that's what counts are built on. But the book shows how phrasal rhythm can coexist with or override metrical structure, creating movement that feels inevitable rather than counted. When I started using this approach with a group of intermediate dancers, it took about two weeks of rehearsal to retrain their instincts. After that, the work felt looser and more organic, even though we were hitting the same structural beats.
What The Book Doesn't Cover
For all its usefulness, there are gaps. The text assumes you already have a basic movement vocabulary. If you're starting from zero — you don't know your way around a room, you haven't developed personal gestural material — this book won't teach you that. It's about organization, not generation. You need to bring your own raw material to the table before the structural framework does much for you. Another limitation: the notation system Humphrey references is her own, informal method, and it's not widely used outside of certain academic circles. If you want to document the work you create using her principles, you're better off pairing this with Labanotation or Benesh Movement Notation for preservation purposes. The book itself is light on notation because Humphrey was primarily concerned with the thinking process, not the archival record. And there's a practical issue with the fall-and-recovery concept when applied to certain types of dancers. If you're working with someone who has significant strength deficits or balance impairments, the model needs adjustment. The theory assumes a baseline of postural control that not every dancer possesses. I've seen choreographers force dancers into fall-and-recovery passages that were physically unsustainable, and the result was always either risky or visually compromised. The workaround is to simplify the amplitude of the imbalance rather than abandon the principle entirely. A small shift of weight followed by a controlled return still functions structurally, even if it doesn't look like a dramatic "fall" in the theatrical sense.
A Note On Reading It
The prose is dense in places and occasionally repetitive, which is partly by design — Humphrey is reinforcing ideas the way a choreographer reinforces a motif. Don't rush through the repetitions. They're where the concept sinks in. I recommend reading a chapter, then immediately going to the studio and trying something with it before moving to the next. The book rewards active engagement much more than passive reading. If you sit down with it and work through a passage at the barre or in the center, you'll understand it faster than if you read it cover to cover in one sitting. The second edition includes additional editorial notes and some supplementary material that wasn't in the original publication. It's worth tracking down if you can, though the core content remains the same. The original 1959 text is still the primary reference point in most dance composition courses, which says something about its durability.
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