DANCING QUEEN
Honors for de Lavallade, who inspired Ailey
At 88 years old, the woman who encouraged Alvin Ailey to dance in the 1950s and inspired ballet superstar Misty Copeland still has some spring in her step — and honors coming her way.
On Monday, Carmen de Lavallade was given the Humanity of Connection Award from Essence magazine and AT&T at the tony New York Historical Society. This Sunday, she will be honored by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater with a special evening of performances at Lincoln Center.
Though she’s been dancing, acting, choreographing and teaching for the better part of seven decades, the Los Angeles native remains mystified by the outpouring of adoration.
“Well, I just find it so moving and it’s really a surprise to me because I didn’t think anybody was watching what I was doing all of this time,” de Lavallade told the Daily News this week. “You just never know. I just go in, and I do my work, and it’s not for awards — certainly not for the money.”
As one of the first African-Americans to dance with the Metropolitan Opera, the Upper West Side resident has had an illustrious career performing many genres of dance, including ballets choreographed by Lester Horton, Agnes de Mille and Geoffrey Holder, who became her husband of 54 years.
A high school classmate of Ailey’s in the 1940s in L.A., she was the one who ignited the spark him to be the force of nature of modern dance he became.
“I just thought he should be a dancer, because he was on the gymnastics team at Thomas Jefferson High School,” she explained. “And in those days, the free exercise looked more like dancing, instead of acrobatics during that time. And they were very slow, and really quite beautiful, and then we were very stretched. And I said, ‘You ought to take dance classes.’”
“Well in those days a guy wouldn’t dare do a thing like that, they would be ostracized,” she said. “So he used to sneak off with me to my dance class at Lester Horton’s. He didn’t tell anybody.”
The two made a formidable pair and both hightailed it to New York City and made their Broadway debut in Truman Capote’s “House of Flowers” in 1951, starring Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll and Holder.
It was in that production that she met Holder, the late Tony Award-winning director and costume designer of “The Wiz,” who also won praise as a James Bond villain in “To Live and Let Die” and a 7 Up soda spokesman. He died in 2014.
In 1958, Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, considered the premier African-American dance company. The theater’s productions have been performed for an estimated 25 million people in 71 countries on six continents.
Ailey, who died in 1989 isn’t the only dance trailblazer de Lavallade impacted. Copeland, who became the first African American woman promoted to principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre in 2015, paid homage when de Lavallade won the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2017 in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve known Carmen for years and … she’s given so much to the art form and to me as a black woman to follow in her footsteps just means the world to me,” Copeland said backstage during the ceremony.
Both dancers have worked hard at mentoring the next generation of black ballet dancers, primarily though programming initiatives spearheaded by the Harlem School of the Arts and the Dance Theater of Harlem, respectively.
When asked about her philosophy on life, de Lavallade deadpanned: “Well, I’m not finished with it yet!”
“No, you never stop learning,” she continued. “There’s always something to learn. Even the other night at the Essence event, with all those wonderful people telling their stories. I was just in awe of how they got there, speaking about their hardships, and the tenacity that they have. I was standing in awe of the people, of the recipients. I’m in awe of them, I really am.”
“As I said that night, I’ve seen all of their beautiful black faces in Geoffrey’s painting,” she added.
De Lavallade revealed plans of getting some exposure for Holder’s art, which is at a storage unit in east Harlem and consists of hundreds of paintings, sketches and collages.
“Well, we hope to have an exhibit of his things. There’s one thing about the young people now too, they’re forgetting the people of the past… These kids don’t know anything. They think they invented everything. No, they did not.”