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The Company in Missa Brevis

Repertory

Missa Brevis

COMPANIES

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

CHOREOGRAPHER

José Limón

COMPANY PREMIERE

New York City Center, 1973

WORLD PREMIERE

Limón Dance Company with the Juilliard Dance Theatre, New York, 1958

MUSIC

Zoltan Kodaly

COSTUMES

Charles D. Tomlinson

LIGHTING

Thomas Skelton

José Limón created this beautiful, emotional ballet after hearing Zoltan Kodaly’s “Missa Brevis in Tempore Belli” (“Short Mass in Time of War”), a score written at the end of World War II. The ballet’s backdrop is reminiscent of the scene in which Kodaly’s score first premiered—a bombed-out church in Budapest in 1945. Limón’s danced mass, like the music, is about affirmation and rebirth, and the moving choreography celebrates the human spirit overcoming hardships.

Donna Wood, Ulyssis Dove, Tina Yuan, Kenneth Pearl in Missa Brevis

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in José Limón's Missa Brevis Photo courtesy of the Ailey Archives

A group of dancers in flesh tone dresses look up and reach their hands to the sky

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Hero Credit: Photo by Fred Fehl