The summer of 2026 is shaping up to be one blockbuster of a cultural season in this little corner of coastal New England.
First came “Rothko, Avery & Gottlieb” to Cape Ann Museum, then came Pinter to Gloucester Stage Company and now, says Lisa Hahn, executive director of Rockport’s Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, after two years of negotiating, comes the world renowned Limón Dance Company to Windhover’s outdoor stage Aug. 14 and 15.
There is no exaggerating the role that Jose Limón (1908-1972), a young Mexican immigrant who founded the company in 1946, played in the evolution of the mid-20th century American modern dance movement.
Perhaps more to the point here on Cape Ann is the role he played in the development of one young girl’s evolution as a dancer.
That girl was Lisa Hahn’s mother, Ina Hahn — who in 1969 would found Windhover, a quaint cluster of rural farm structures converted to a performing arts center in the spirit of New England’s early rural dance laboratories, scenic campuses such as Jacobs Pillow, where in the 1940s and 50s, dancers worked in and were inspired by the outdoors, free to learn from each other and invent an entirely new vocabulary of movement and choreography.
Ina Hahn first met Jose Limón when she was a student at Wellesley, and might never have become the renowned dancer she became if she hadn’t.
It was Limón, says Lisa Hahn, who encouraged her mother to connect with Doris Humphrey, another founding pioneer of American modern dance. Humphrey was Limóns mentor and role model and would in turn become mentor and role model to the young Ina.
When Arthritis put an early end to Humphrey’s dancing days, Limón made her Artistic Director of the company he founded in 1946, and their combined influence made the Jose Limón Company a dance phenomenon.
Limón looked and moved like a matador, and was in fact quoted as saying that a dancer must be “part matador.” Critics crowned him a “formidable force, ” His star as a dancer was on the rise in New York City’s 1930s modern dance scene, a decade in which the now legendary choreographer George Balanchine also arrived fresh from Russia’s Imperial Ballet School and become famous for saying “ballet is the woman.” Limón was determined to show the world what a man could do.
In 1942, he choreographed a solo piece for himself to make his point powerfully Created to Bach’s “baroque violin masterpiece” of the same name, it too was hailed as a masterpiece, and would in time be danced by some of the Classical ballet world’s greatest male dancers, including Nureyev and Barishnikov.
All these decades later, Windhover audiences will get to see for themselves how this electrifying tour de force not only “achieved its goal of “elevating the role of the male dancer,“ but has stood the test of time in a powerful performance.
“Chaconne” will be followed by “A Piece of Choreographic Offerings,” created by Limón in 1963 in beloved memory of None other than other than the great Doris Humphrey. Here, Limón has woven together elements of Humphrey’s trail blazing technique in an expansive, fast moving full ensemble piece set again, to the music of Bach.
Finally, the final performance on the program, a recreation of a lost Work by Doris Humphrey, that, says Lisa Hahn, “would mean the world to my mother to see at Windhover.”
Joann Mackenzie may be contacted at 978-675-2707 or jmackenzie@northofboston.com.