“RISE AND RESIST” A LABOR OF LOVE FOR DANCE COMPANY
Dance legend Donald McKayle lives on in Cleo Parker Robinson Dance’s “Rise and Resist”
Cleo Parker Robinson counts herself lucky to have gotten so much of late choreographer Donald McKayle’s work, including his final piece.
But as is often said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.
“The first time my (dancers) ran it on Aug. 20, I thought they were going to die,” Robinson said with a laugh over the phone last week. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, we have an entire performance before we even get to this piece!’ But it was so moving, emotionally. People in the room were crying and couldn’t breathe. You felt like you were in the middle of a hurricane.”
McKayle, who helped pioneer modern dance in the mid-20th century and became the first black man to choreograph and direct Broadway musicals, loved Robinson’s Denver-based dance company. In fact, McKayle gave Cleo Parker Robinson Dance (CPRD) his blessing to perform a dozen of his pieces — more than any other company.
Still, there were no guarantees that when McKayle died on
April 6, 2018, at the age of 87, Robinson would be the one providing public access to “Crossing the Rubicon” — which McKayle choreographed from his wheelchair. As a Tonyand Emmy-nominated choreographer and dance professor at various colleges, McKayle had already won a spot on the Dance Heritage Foundation’s original list of America’s 100 “irreplaceable dance treasures,” according to a New York Times obituary.
That made him a subject of great interest both before and after his death, having influenced and worked with countless companies and student groups around the world. But his four-decade friendship with Robinson was special.
“He gave us the last two works because he wanted us to perform them,” said Robinson, whose Five Points-based company has received multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, yet still struggles to pay the bills most seasons. “What’s extraordinary is that two of (McKayle’s) dancers are now in our company.”
McKayle spent his final decades at the University of California at Irvine, where he worked as chairman of its dance department, following overlapping stints in Broadway, film and television. “Crossing the Rubicon” has only ever been performed by UC Irvine’s Etude Ensemble, and its Sept. 21-22 Denver debut marks its professionalcompany premiere.
That’s significant, since other prestigious dance companies are hoping to grab “Crossing the Rubicon: Passing the Point of No Return” after CPRD performs it, such as New York-based Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Paul Taylor Dance Company, Robinson said.
The only place to see it, for now, is in CPRD’s “Rise and Resist,” a civil rightsthemed program at DU’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts this weekend.
The show is centered around “Crossing the Rubicon,” but also contains the original Robinson work ”The MOVE/ment,” which CPRD introduced earlier this year alongside Colorado Ballet at the Tour de Force concert. The five pieces that make up “Rise and Resist” aren’t injections of political commentary, Robinson said, but rather art with the perpetually relevant social-justice themes that have long run in CPRD’s veins.
That said, few works that CPRD has performed since its 1970 debut have been as physically and emotionally demanding as “Rubicon,” which traces the plight of Syrian refugees with aching uncertainty.
“I’ve never seen it done,” Robinson said of McKayle’s late choreographic process, which found him setting and rehearsing pieces from his wheelchair. “I believe that he had such a group of dedicated dancers that had worked with him from the time they were freshmen to their senior years, and he knew what he could pull from them. He had created this vocabulary of movement for all of his work, and so when I watch it that’s what I see. I call it ‘blood memory.’ ... ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ is almost like a retrospective.”
Robinson points to McKayle’s diverse influences, not just in African-American dance forms but East Indian movement (hand and finger gestures known as mudras), across shows like “Uprooted.”
That was McKayle’s second-to-last work, and one that CPRD has already performed.
“Given that we have more of his (repertory) than any other company, we are definitely dedicated to this man,” said Robinson, who welcomed McKayle répétiteur (or creative coach and steward) Stephanie Powell to Five Points for the “Crossing the Rubicon” rehearsals last month.
“While I was watching rehearsals I had this mental, visual and spiritual newsreel in my brain, and I could just see all the pieces that Mr. McKayle has created for us over these 30 or 40 years,” Robinson said. “It’s all of his compassion, his genius and everything he poured into his work, and a gift to his students. The dance muses are definitely in the room when it’s happening.”