Influences

"The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing." - Doris Humphrey

Doris Humphrey was influenced by a variety of people growing up in Illinois. The two most important of those people were her parents. Her mother, Julia Ellen Wells was a trained concert pianist, who also taught piano for extra income. Her father, Horace Buckingham Humphrey, was a journalist and a one-time hotel manager for vaudeville entertainers. Both of her parents were very passionate about education. Although they were short on money, they still found ways to fund for her education, and therefore sent her to Francis Parker School in Chicago. At this school education was based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education and experiential/experimental learning. Humphrey carried this into her teaching methodology and maintained this educational philosophy through life. It was also at this school where Mary Wood Hinman taught dance, and truly inspired Humphrey to move. She would stage pageants and programs of folk and interpretive dances in the school, in which Humphrey shone. After graduation, Mary Wood Hinman encouraged Humphrey to go to Los Angeles for a summer course offered at the Denishawn School.

It was here at Denishawn that her talents were well recognized and she soon was given solo roles, assistant positions, and offered to choreograph. Although Ruth St. Denis encouraged Humphrey to dance, Humphrey was very different from her. Ruth St. Denis was driven by religious messages, and Humphrey was not. Therefore, with Charles Weidman, she left for the East in New York to discover new ways to move the body.

As Doris Humphrey created her dance theory about the fall and recovery of movement, she claims that it was highly inspired by a Germain philosophizer, Friedrich Nietzsche’s book, The Birth of Tragedy. It was in this book that Humphrey read about idea of the split in the human psyche between each person's Apollonian side (rational, intellectual) and our Dionysian side (chaotic, emotional). Not only did this German philosophizer inspire Humphrey’s ideas in choreography, but you can also see imprints that Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture left on her life and choreography.