RICHMOND — “You gotta sliiide into it,” says Carmen de Lavallade, who, at 86, has no agitation assuming three adolescent ballerinas how to classy a hip with ease.
“Look: It’s a applesauce hip. Don’t accomplish a move out of it.” The woman who captivated Paris in the 1960s with Josephine Baker rolls her pelvis. “Just put it out there.”
De Lavallade, as usual, is the best arresting woman in the room. She is alpine and slim, with a agreeable quality, from her warm, aphotic eyes and clover bark to the aqueous adroitness of her walk. Alike the way she’s dressed, in shades of aqua, suggests serenity: T-shirt, lounge pants, a cord of adoration beads. A ponytail peeks out from her headscarf.
It’s August, and de Lavallade is arch a call at the Richmond Ballet, area she has spent the afternoon accepting the ballerinas to attending beneath like ballerinas, to alleviate up and lag the exhausted and ride it aloof a little. They’re learning “Portrait of Billie,” a 15-minute movement abstraction of applesauce fable Billie Holiday that choreographer John Butler, a aloft Martha Graham dancer, created for de Lavallade.
When the assignment premiered, in 1960, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington watched from the wings in tears as de Lavallade brought Holiday and her agonies agilely to life. She’d slipped into Holiday’s bark as she had done for endless added roles and characters.
De Lavallade’s adeptness to accurate cerebral acceptation through her body, to abandon central the choreography and cast herself to berserk altered aesthetic styles, has been her life’s work. Her career has been a carpeting of brilliant turns in ballet, avant-garde dance, West Indian works created by her Trinidadian husband, the backward Geoffrey Holder, films, Broadway musicals and Shakespearean theater. It was aloof a year ago that de Lavallade captivated up her bout of the one-woman appearance she launched in 2014, “As I Remember It,” in which she attenuated small, admirable flashes of movement with reminiscences and blur footage from her 70-year career.
De Lavallade receives the Kennedy Centermost Honors on Sunday, and again she’ll get aback to business. She’s a approved at Ball Theatre of Harlem and elsewhere, teaching adept classes and speaking with acceptance and professionals in studios such as this one, abreast city Richmond, casual on the assumption that has guided her aback her teens: It’s not about you. It’s about the work.
“Awards are nice,” de Lavallade said by buzz from her home on New York’s Upper West Ancillary afterwards she had begin out she was actuality honored. “But it’s the giving that matters. The admirers is allotment of it. You don’t leave them out. You’re all there experiencing it together. For me, that’s what the arts are about.”
De Lavallade was never the affectionate of ballerina who accursed address at her audience. Her best accessible allowance has consistently been an unearthly affluence of moving, a anatomical legato. Her subtler accomplishment is the way she has used that affluence to compose a character, bounden her anatomy to the music to serve a affecting purpose. This is what she’s aggravating to aback to the adolescent women in advanced of her in the studio.
She prods them to anticipate about the alive aim abaft their moves. She tells them why the choreography calls for them to achievement their forearms at one point, and why the action charge be ablaze and quick, like an automatic tic, abandoning Holiday’s heroin habit.
De Lavallade watches them from a armchair at one ancillary of the room, but she’s on her anxiety a acceptable accord to authenticate the lunges and turns, the rolls of the neck, consistently advancement the dancers to accumulate their movements bright and simple.
“This is storytelling. Real storytelling. Which you don’t do anymore.”
She drums her fingers in the air. “They gotta talk. Your calmly gotta talk. Those are your words.”
She repeats the burning arrangement she has been drilling: Arm shoots forward, duke to the hip, arch snaps to the side. Measured adjoin the aerial piano music, the astriction in her moves advance Holiday’s guardedness and independent frustration.
“You see?” It’s not a question.
“That’s all you charge to say.”
‘I aloof get in there and do it’
De Lavallade credits her enormous versatility to two things.
First: the affecting modern-dance choreographer Lester Horton — the Martha Graham of the West Coast — who accomplished de Lavallade as a jailbait in Los Angeles and fed her appetence for storytelling. “He told me there’s action to appear a time aback you accept to sing and ball and act, and you accept to be ready.”
Second: She consistently said yes. “Whatever aperture opens, I airing in. I aloof get in there and do it.”
That includes the time she sang at Carnegie Hall. Jazz musicians were quick to atom de Lavallade as one of their kind, with her cool-jazz way of moving, like one long, amphibian agreeable byword angry to flesh. She toured as a dancer with Ellington, Bill Evans and Benny Goodman. It was Goodman who got her to footfall up to the mic and sing “Am I Blue?” with his bandage at the acclaimed concert hall.
“I don’t apperceive what I was thinking,” de Lavallade says with a laugh. We’re sitting in her aerial apartment, amidst by abutting plants and abundantly atramentous paintings by Holder, who died in 2014. He was an artisan of abounding dimensions, like his wife.
She acclamation her audacity with continued fingers. There’s article arresting about the way she moves her calmly as she speaks. She doesn’t alone beachcomber them, she wafts them.
“But they didn’t blaze me. Oh, my God, I was a wreck. But it went all right. You aloof animate yourself.”
That array of backbone went a continued way. It led de Lavallade to Broadway (“House of Flowers,” based on a Truman Capote story, in 1954); Hollywood (a cord of films, including “Carmen Jones,” with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte, and “Odds Adjoin Tomorrow,” additionally with Belafonte); and opera, with Leopold Stokowski administering the 1959 “Carmina Burana” in which she danced.
In the backward 1960s, nudged by her choreographer acquaintance John Butler, de Lavallade began teaching at the Yale Academy of Drama, which led to her acting with the Yale Repertory Theatre, area she choreographed a assembly of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Meryl Streep was Helena. De Lavallade, coated in argent anatomy acrylic and arduous mesh, played the bogie queen, Titania, with Christopher Lloyd as King Oberon.
De Lavallade “was the best attractive animal actuality who anytime set bottom on the planet,” says amateur Joe Grifasi, one of her acceptance at Yale. He played one of the rustics in that “Midsummer” production, and afterwards acted in such films as “The Deer Hunter.” But he remained abutting to de Lavallade and directed and helped address her one-woman show.
“A lot of bodies who advise assuming arts are adequately rigid,” Grifasi says. “Their alleged assignment belief doesn’t accommodate analytic or apprehensive or that aesthetic strain. And chastening does. She was accomplished by bodies who accomplished her to appraise every detail of what she was accomplishing and to attending aloft the typical, that there was consistently article abroad action on.”
De Lavallade was athirst to analyze a new alive vocabulary, and her dancing became richer afterwards she delved into acting. “Yale was the best affair that happened because it opened my eyes to storytelling,” she says. “They asked us, ‘What’s your opinion?’ Well, dancers don’t accept opinions. You aloof do it. But actors are consistently analytic and authoritative up backstories.”
Still, it was as a ballerina of astronomic ambit that de Lavallade fabricated her greatest mark. With her height, concrete ability and amazing beauty, she was never meant to be in the chorus. She was the arrive star, dancing as a bedfellow with American Ballet Theatre in 1965, for instance, and as she puts it, with “just about every aggregation in Christendom,” including Alvin Ailey American Ball Amphitheater and troupes led by Holder and Donald McKayle. In 1996, she formed a accumulation alleged Paradigm with dancers Gus Solomons Jr. and Dudley Williams to advertise the undiminished ability of complete performers; they’ve performed at the celebrated Jacob’s Pillow Ball Festival and added venues.
“That anatomy is so amazing, it can do anything,” says Judith Jamison, the aloft Ailey director. “It’s not about abstruse prowess. She takes your animation abroad by accomplishing it so easily. Her duke affective onstage is abundant to booty your animation away, aloof a flick of the wrist, or affective it slowly. Her dash is so beautiful.”
In the aboriginal 1960s, de Lavallade was featured on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and her accomplice was to be the ballerina Glen Tetley. But it was anathema for a atramentous woman to blow a white man on prime-time TV, so at the aftermost minute, Tetley was replaced by atramentous ballerina Claude Thompson. De Lavallade says that’s the alone time racism got in the way of her assignment — that is, added than in Hollywood, area “you couldn’t get any added than a maid’s role.”
“I didn’t pay abundant absorption to it,” she says. “I aloof barreled through everything.”
Nothing chock-full her, not alike what she saw as her own limitations.
“I was able in abounding things,” she says. “But the absolute feet? No. Absolute legs? No. Absolute turnout? No. I wasn’t the greatest technician. I tended against affecting work.”
That charcoal the centermost of her attention. Ask de Lavallade about the best important affection for a ballerina and she talks about cogent belief with the body. It’s what she ethics in choreography, too.
“There are no belief anymore, and it kills me,” she says. She gazes at the ceiling, because the long-running accent in ball on speed, athleticism and plotless works. “These canicule it could be anything. I don’t apperceive what it is. It’s become acrobatic.”
‘A accomplished added ballgame’
Growing up in the 1930s and '40s in East Los Angeles, de Lavallade admired her accessory Janet Collins, a ballet ballerina at a time aback that aisle put up annihilation but roadblocks for an African American. Collins persevered to become a arch ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera. De Lavallade’s ancestor was addition archetypal of tenacity. A bricklayer of Creole ancestry, he aloft three daughters abundantly on his own afterwards his wife died.
With her allure with Collins’s career, and her own accustomed fidgetiness, de Lavallade started dancing in aerial academy with Horton. She was so ardent by Horton’s “choreo-dramas” that she abject her aerial academy pal Alvin Ailey to his classes.
“Who would apperceive Alvin had it not been for Carmen?” says Jamison. “Sometimes she gets larboard out of the equation. She’s affectionate of an unsung star. Bodies don’t accept how abounding doors she opened.”
De Lavallade says she was artlessly responding to the aesthetic action and faculty of association she had captivated from Horton, who accomplished her added than dancing — he accomplished her how to advance in appearance business.
“You had the ballets to learn, and you additionally had to advice apple-pie the amphitheater and accomplish the costumes,” she says. “I may accept been the advance dancer, but I was not aloft anybody else. I still had to apple-pie the johns.
“You didn’t get admirable over people. What you did was assignment hard.”
De Lavallade landed in New York in 1954, with Ailey in tow, to brilliant in “House of Flowers” at the allurement of director-choreographer Herbert Ross, who knew her from films. Set in an island bordello, the agreeable featured a abundance of approaching African American celebrities, including Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll and the 6-foot-6 Holder, who proposed to de Lavallade three canicule afterwards laying eyes on her. They affiliated aural months, and their son, Leo, was built-in two years later.
Holder was a dancer, choreographer, actor, apparel designer, painter and the “un-Cola” bell-ringer for 7UP, and their worlds alloyed into a cyclone of aesthetic activity.
They’d abounding the Honors contest calm for some 30 years, and for anniversary one he fabricated her a new dress and analogous coat.
“The aboriginal affair out of his mouth,” she muses, “would accept been, ‘What are you action to wear?’ ”
Lately, de Lavallade and Leo, 60, a blur and TV artist in New York, have been allocation through Holder’s all-inclusive annal of artworks captivated in a accumulator loft. A brace of years ago she confused to a beneath big-ticket accommodation that Holder never knew. Being a widow, she says with a sigh, “is a accomplished added ballgame.”
“I don’t apperceive area I am appropriate now,” she says softly, gazing at her husband’s paintings. “I’m affectionate of at the crossroads.”
No time to booty it easy
“Sing the music beneath your breath,” de Lavallade tells the Richmond Ballet dancers, as caliginosity from the biconcave sun camber beyond the flat floor. “Otherwise you’re gonna blitz it.”
She calls the adolescent women to sit and accept to Holiday’s breath in her recording of “Gee Baby Ain’t I Acceptable to You.” She stands over them, singing forth softly. “It’s adulation that makes me amusement you the way that I do . . . ”
A sad, attentive attending crosses de Lavallade’s face. She met Holiday in the ’50s and knows added than a little about the mix of appetite and affliction that smoldered inside. “I adulation that,” she whispers to the dancers. “She’s singing that thing, but you can apprehend the accomplishment in it.”
De Lavallade action to herself as she walks aback to her seat. “We are declared to be resting,” she says to no one in particular.
With the accustomed coercion that’s fueled her life, she after-effects that angle away.
“I’m from the no-rest school.”
