Betty Jones: a legend remembers.

• Position: Dancer - Interview

Betty Jones is revered internationally as the foremost proponent of Jose Limon's style and artistic philosophy. A Hawaii resident since the early 1970s, she spends five months a year jetting around the globe in response to the requests for her expertise that just keep coming--from Surabaya, Seoul, New York, Mexico City, the European capitals, Guangzhou--and she has a standing invitation to teach at American Dance Festival, the prestigious annual gathering of the clans in Durham, North Carolina. A perfect body and an active company have also kept her center stage in her Humphrey-Limon reconstructions.

Looking at her, it is hard to believe that Betty Jones's career started during World War II, when she danced her way through New Guinea and the Philippines in Oklahoma, performing for never fewer than ten thousand troops. Limon first spotted her talents in 1946 at Jacob's Pillow, the hallowed training ground of American dance in Massachusetts's Berkshire Mountains. Just out of uniform himself, he was refining the aesthetic that would challenge Martha Graham's dominance of the field. Although Jones swears she does not know what Limon saw in her, she concedes that she assimilated his material quickly, enabling him to form his nucleus company with only three other disciples, a musician, and a lighting technician.

Almost overnight the twenty-two-year-old became a legend when Limon cast her as the Desdemona figure opposite his Othello in "The Moor's Pavane." According to her entry in The Biographic? Dictionary of Dance, even if Jones had done nothing else, "she would still be acclaimed for her exquisitely characterized portrayal of the victim in that popular and magnificent work." Jones has lost count of the other Limon works she premiered, and to this day she has not been surpassed as Desdemona. But mention the applause and her modesty shifts to high gear. "I feel very foolish when people carry on," she says, "because all I've ever done as a dancer is just go forward." In spite of her modesty and her hectic travel schedule, Jones recently agreed to be interviewed at her Hawaii home.

Americas: How did Jose Limon choose you for his company?

Jones: His wife asked me if I was interested in concert dance, and at the time I was really ignorant of what that was. I had planned to get a night job in a show and go to Columbia University. Anyway, I said that I wasn't interested, and in the fall, I got into Bloomer Girl, with choreography by Agnes de Mille...