Looks inside four of Doris Humphrey's major choreographic works - Water Study, The Shakers, With My Red Fires, and Passacaglia -with an eye to how directorial strategies applied in recent contemporised stagings could work across the modern and contemporary dance genre. Lesley Main stresses to the reader the need to balance respect for classical works from the modern dance repertory with the necessity for fresh directorial strategies, to balance between traditional practices and a creative role for the reconstructor.

Lesley Main is a leading European exponent of Doris Humphrey's dance tradition, director of the Doris Humphrey Foundation UK, and principal lecturer on dance at Middlesex University.