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October 6, 2025 13 mins
The Limón Dance Company launches their celebration of the company’s first 80 years with a program at The Joyce Theater honoring eight decades of revolutionary modern dance, from October 14-19, 2025. Our guest is Artistic Director Dante Puleio.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven light FM.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Thank you for listening to Get Connected where I am
pleased to welcome back Dante Poleo, artistic director of the
Lemone Dance Company, shortly beginning celebrations of the company's first
eighty years with an upcoming program at the Joyce Theater
honoring eight decades of revolutionary modern dance. The performances come
up soon October fourteenth to nineteenth. Tickets are on sale

(00:34):
now at Joyce dot org and you can find out
more about the company at Limone dot NYC. But Dante Poleo,
it's nice to see you again. Thanks for coming back.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Nice to see you, Thanks for having me. I love
that you said the first eighty years. That's well said.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
There's a long way to go, right, you're just kind
of getting rolling.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
So first eighty years, the.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
First eighty years, So we have to go back in
history though to start, I think jose Lemon in dance.
Why is he's so important in dance history?

Speaker 5 (01:02):
You know, he was a very cool guy. He came
over to America.

Speaker 3 (01:07):
From Mexico in the early nineteen hundreds, his family was
escaping the Mexican Revolution.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
They came to America, and.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
Then he had this really wild ride, you know, being
in America in those early days.

Speaker 5 (01:21):
You know, when he was in Mexico, he was taught
to be.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Ashamed of his indigenous heritage, but take pride in his
Spanish heritage and his European heritage. And when he comes
to America and he's taught to be a shame to
be Mexican, and like this like multi level, like layers
of shame about identity. I think really impacted who he
was and.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
How he saw the world. And I think because he
comes at it.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
From so many different perspectives, his level of empathy is
so strong, and he can see so many sides to
every single point. And I think when you're creating art
and you're building something for mankind, for humankind, and you're
able to look at it from so many different perspectives,
you're able to really create something that speaks to the

(02:09):
human experience and give pathways into each of his stories,
knowing that it's going to be looked at from so
many different perspectives. And I think the breadth of His
work speaks to that, and I think now more than ever,
is more important to find those places that we actually
can connect.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
There's also something about the look of his work, not
all of it, I'm not familiar with all of it,
but he originally wanted to be a painter and he
was enthralled by dance instead. And when you look at
the forms he uses, it almost still feels like he's
thinking as a visual artist. It's three D now and
it's moving.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
Yeah, I always think about that when like, that's one
of the things I love most about his work is
sitting in the house, but sitting on the upper mezzanine
and seeing it from the top, because you can see
the way the bodies shift from side to side, and
all of a sudden there'll be in a circle, and
then all of a sudden they'll be in a line,
and it's like this painting that's moving. So I think
his years as a visual artist really instructed his craft.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
There's one other thing I want to ask about, just
that time in history. You know, I happen to be
watching right now this thing about the history of film,
and it occurred to me.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Lemon Dance Company was founded in nineteen forty six. Can
you also give us some context as to what was
going on in dance and art at that time that
he was responding to.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, he so, like you said, he thought he came
to New York thinking he was going to be a painter,
and then he went to an exhibition and he went, oh,
this person has already painted everything that I wanted to paint.
So he spent a year really distraught and aimless, as
he mentions in his memoirs. And then he was introduced
to Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. They had just left

(03:48):
at Denis Shaun School and were starting their own company
in school. So now Jose enters at this moment when
they're beginning to build something, and you know, we're talking
about the late nineteen twenties, early nineteen thirties, talking about
being between two world wars, we're talking about the Great Depression.
So these really intense moments in our history impacted the

(04:09):
kind of art that Jose and Darris and Charles were making.
So you know, up to this point, we had experienced
a lot of Eurocentric ballet, a lot of storytelling that
had to do the fairies and ghosts and farm animals
and kings and queens, and I think Jose and Doris
were really interested in looking at what it was to
be a human being in this country at that time,

(04:32):
and their work really reflected this idea of community and
this idea of hope inside of despair, and that lives
not only inside of the work itself, but also inside
of the physical technique. There's this constant resisting against gravity
and then giving in to gravity versus creating shapes and
presentation and being about the forward, but really being about

(04:55):
what's happening inside of the community.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
We're speaking with Dante Paleo. He is the sixth artistic
director of the Lemon Dance Company in their eighty year history.
It's a position that originated with Doris Humphrey. The upcoming
program at the Joyce Theater honors those eight decades of
revolutionary modern dance with performances October fourteenth through nineteenth. Tickets
are on sale at Joyce dot org. You can find

(05:19):
out more about the company at Lemon Limo n dot NYC.
You're listening to get connected on one six point seven
light FM. I'm na del Rio. So you have these
upcoming performances, You're looking at eighty years, how do you
balance that vision with this performance and what you're doing
in general.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yeah, So whenever I build a program or a season,
I'm thinking about who jose was, why he made.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
The works he made.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
So this way, my audience has something they can identify with,
and they're looking at the older works. It's like, what
is important about this work or what is it important
to pull about him to give people some insider draw
people in a little bit more. And then when I
look at that, So this season, I'm looking at you know,
I've looked at the women who influenced him.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
I looked at his.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
You know, his Mexican heritage and how that shaped his choreography.
And this season I'm really looking at the male power
dynamics he really He's one of the only choreographers that
featured the male protagonist and a male antagonist in so
many of his works. So you have these two men
with this passion between them.

Speaker 5 (06:28):
And that just makes me wonder what is it that.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
He was exploring from his own personal life, Because he
says that you know dance my works and you'll know
who I am.

Speaker 4 (06:36):
All dance is autobiographical, So you know.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
I'm wondering about the homo eroticism in his work and
this really intense male and male relationship that comes through
a lot of his works.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Tell me about Chakan, then, Chakan is something that is
obviously male centric.

Speaker 3 (06:53):
It was a solo piece, so this is one of
the first solos he made for himself, and to honor
the history of these eighty years, we're kicking off the
program with this chicon But instead of it just being
the solo that he had created for himself to show
that men can dance and men can take presents on stage,
we are doing a multi generational group version.

Speaker 4 (07:17):
So we have.

Speaker 5 (07:17):
Over twenty artists that span from people who.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
Have danced with Lemon himself all the way all the
way to students who are learning about Lemon for the
first time.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
So we have this really.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Beautiful collection of people who've been in the company and
people who are teaching the work, and people who are
learning about the work, all on stage to share and
celebrate him and this iconic moment.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
I love that. That sounds fantastic. You're also presenting the
Emperor Jones. It's from nineteen fifty six, so shkinda put
it in context. Was nineteen forty two. The Emperor Jones
is nineteen fifty six that's based on a play.

Speaker 3 (07:52):
Yeah, Eugene o'neils play The Emperor Jones, And the play
itself follows this person who had escaped and being enslaved
and goes to this Caribbean island and takes over and
becomes a tyrant, and then the people rise up against
him and he eventually is killed or kills himself. It's

(08:14):
you know, a silver bullet is this theme. And now
when Jose created he didn't he wasn't creating like a
ballet version of the play. He took the themes of
the play and created this like wild fever dream of
this man's emotional journey. And now I'm taking that piece
out of the Caribbean and I'm bringing it into contemporary

(08:37):
urban context. So I'm reimagining what this work can look
like in this moment today. You know, you think about
a convicted felon being a tyrannical leader, one's imagination doesn't
have to go far to draw the contemporary parallel. But
in this particular play, it gets more complex than that.
So what else can we deem from the story?

Speaker 4 (09:00):
Else can we shine?

Speaker 3 (09:00):
What other lights can we shine on it to see
what other things are important.

Speaker 4 (09:04):
About this work?

Speaker 2 (09:05):
And you reconstructed the music for it.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
When we did it in twenty eleven, they brought the
score back and parts of that we're missing, but then
they found it.

Speaker 5 (09:13):
So now we're going to be able to do it
with a new recording.

Speaker 3 (09:19):
And it's going, you know, it's it's fascinating to see
like this history of music, the way it keeps growing,
and now we're able to use this new score or
the reimagined score.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
What I love about the first two pieces that you've
talked about so far also is you're not that they
are specimens of a certain time, but you're taking them
out of that and you're also sort of recreating them.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
You know, we can go back and we can do
historical versions of these works, which I do sometimes in
a program, but I also want to see how far
we can stretch some of these works as well, so
thinking about new costumes and new prop pieces, and you know,
just setting it in a different time to see how
else the story can can shine.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
So you said this program also touches on hose Mexican heritage,
and indeed you have a world premiere by a Mexican choreographer,
Diego Vega Solorza. He looks very Alexander McQueen and all
of his works so far, that's the way to put it.
I'm not sure how to put it, but can you
talk about who he is and how you would describe
his work.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
Yeah, So when I was looking at the overall season,
I was thinking about this aspect of Jose. I'm pulling
from his works that threaded these men against each other,
this malepower dynamic situation. Diego and I had been talking
for a while and I was really drawn to his aesthetic.
I loved the work that I had seen of his,
and so I knew that he lived in that world already.

Speaker 5 (10:41):
He came from the same area of Mexico as Jose.

Speaker 3 (10:44):
He grew up in a similarly strong Catholic household, where
the expectations of men and religion were very similar, and
so his art making comes from a similar place. But
the differences are so striking that I thought a conversation
between the two artists would be really rich at this moment.

(11:06):
So we started talking. I was like, you know, this
is this is where I'm at, this is what I'm thinking.
Where you know, would you like to be a part
of that journey? And he was like, yeah, absolutely, let's
make some stuff together.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
So how does he see Jose le Mon? Do you
think what has been the conversation?

Speaker 4 (11:21):
He sees him?

Speaker 3 (11:22):
As you know, the icon is legend, this man who
grew up in a small area of Mexico and then
ended up becoming the world's first or of the America's
first cultural ambassador for the United States. So it's you know,
how do you see that person, you know, who lived
one hundred years before you did and then managed to
do this really monumental thing at a time when he

(11:44):
really wasn't supposed to.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
There wasn't space for a man.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Like Jose Lemon in the mid nineteen fifties, but this happened.
So the kind of light and kind of path that
Jose created for artists like Diego, I think comes really
like a light for.

Speaker 4 (12:03):
Them to follow this path that they created.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
So I think he's following that and hoping to live
in that and then go beyond that with his own
with his own art making.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
So I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves,
but this is as we've sort of been told, this
is the beginning of the first eighty years. The first
the first celebration of the first performance is do you
know what's coming next? What have you planned? Oh?

Speaker 4 (12:27):
We have so much great stuff.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
And the way to find out about that is by
signing up for our newsletters and going on to our
social media's and following all of those.

Speaker 2 (12:37):
That's a very lovely way to put that.

Speaker 5 (12:39):
Sure, yeah, nice, a nice way to plug it right.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Absolutely. You can find out more at lumone dot NYC.
Tickets are on sale now for performances coming up soon
at the Joyce October fourteenth through nineteenth at the website
Joyce dot org. Anything that you want to else, you
want to add about that program, Yeah.

Speaker 5 (12:56):
I'm looking forward to seeing everyone there.

Speaker 3 (12:58):
It's going to be a really great celebration. It's a
really tight program. You we have three pieces, so I
think you come, you get this really beautiful experience, and
then you walk.

Speaker 4 (13:08):
Away inspired excellent.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Dante Poleo is artistic director of the Lemon Dance Company.
Thank you for being on Get Connected.

Speaker 4 (13:16):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven Light FM. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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