Ballet dancers get naked (emotionally) in a modern Limón work

New York

"MODERN dance," the choreographer José Limón wrote in 1965, "is not a 'popular art'." Nor is it an advertiser's dream. "A pretty ballerina in a pert tutu and pink toe shoe," he continued, "is a much more fetching sales pitch than a vision of a barefoot dancer in a species of ecstasy or suffering." But for Dance Theater of Harlem's City Center season, beginning Wednesday, Virginia Johnson, the company's artistic director, wants her ballet dancers to brush up against some of that ecstasy and suffering.

The José Limón Dance Foundation operates out of Dance Theater of Harlem's headquarters. So when Johnson decided that she wanted to have a classic modern work in the repertory, it was natural…