Wikipedia has a good biography:
Jose Arcadio Limon was born January 12 in Culiacan, Mexicon. He was the first-born child with eleven siblings to follow. By 1915, the family moved to the United States; first to Tucson, Arizona, then to Los Angeles, California. After Graduating from Lincoln High School, Limon entered the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) as an art major. He moved to New York city in 1928 to study at the New York School of Design, still not a dancer. It was the following year when Limon saw a dance performance that inspired him. Harold Kreutzberg and Yvonne Gerogi’s performance was the epiphany that led Limon to dance. He said, “Suddenly, onto the stage, borne on the impetus of the heroic rhapsody, bounded an ineffable creature and his partner. Instantly and irrevocably, I was transformed. I knew with shocking suddenness that until then I had not been alive or, rather, that I had yet been unborn…now I did not want to remain on this earth unless I learned to do what this man was doing.”
Donna is truly sublime. Period. She’s a fucking amazing gracious and lovely human, glorious dancer, amazing instructor, choreographer – and brilliant scholar! I truly do not have adequate superlatives to convey my passion.
Wow – In Nirvana right now! Donna literally kicks butt (every muscle in my body has that exquisite sweet-soreness from a thorough workout); from a 40 minute warm-up, to bodywork, and full out drills.
I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love.
Many thanks, and love devotion to Rachel, and to Rob of The Yoga Place for hosting a spectacular retreat!
“Donna Mejia is a choreographer, lecturer, teacher, administrator, and performer specializing in contemporary dance, traditions of the Arab/African Diaspora, and new fusion traditions in world electronica. Donna is amongst a handful of artists authorized to instruct the Brazilian Silvestre Modern Dance Technique (an esoteric, codified system of contemporary dance technique).”
I posted video back in October, and since then a few more have been posted on her YouTube Channel. Cannot explain it completely, but having only encountered Donna through the digital medium, I’ve come to admire and respect this artist like I have never before. “Authenticity” comes to mind, but that only scratches the surface of what watching her perform evokes. There’s an earth honesty that flash for me whenever I see her energy move.
Add to that that she is the founder and director of the Sovereign Project:
“The Sovereign Collective: A Complete Re-Visioning of a Traditional Dance Company
“Sovereign” is a movement arts and social action collective pledged to elevate social consciousness toward a reverent connection to the human body. This project is an effort to mobilize concerned citizens around an issue that can seem too large for an individual to take on: sovereignty of the human body.
Transgressions against physical self-determination manifest across international, cultural, religious, political and economic lines in a multitude of practices: genital mutilation; legally sanctioned infantile marriages; elder abuse; sexual servitude; censorship of sexual information; slavery; honor killings; media-influenced distortions of body-image; domestic violence; military torture; inaccessibility to affordable healthcare; forced medical intervention or end of life management; etc.”
:: Body pixel
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May 31 2010
