Dancer Carmen de Lavallade Reflects on Her Career in "As I Remember It" | Big Think

Dancer Carmen de Lavallade Reflects on Her Career in "As I Remember It"

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For over 60 years, dancer Carmen de Lavallade has performed worldwide in collaboration with legendary artists such as Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington. Still performing in her 80s, Ms. de Lavallade is currently touring an autobiographical show called As I Remember It. The production features Ms. de Lavallade performing with projections of her younger self as well as with films featuring some of her significant collaborators. Stories of her years in California dancing with Lester Horton, in New York with Alvin Ailey and her time spent as a member of the Yale Repertory Theatre frame the evening. In this Big Think interview, Ms. de Lavallade recounts the process that led to show's development.

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CARMEN DE LAVALLADE:

Carmen de Lavallade has had an unparalleled career in dance, theater, film and television beginning in her hometown of Los Angeles performing with the Lester Horton Dance Theater. While in Los Angeles, Lena Horne introduced the then 17 year old de Lavallade to the filmmakers at 20thCentury Fox where she appeared in four movies, including Carmen Jones(1954) with Dorothy Dandridge and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) with Harry Belafonte. During the filming of Carmen Jones, she met Herbert Ross, who asked her to appear as a dancer in the Broadway production ofHouse of Flowers. Her dance career includes having ballets created for her by Lester Horton, Geoffrey Holder, Alvin Ailey, Glen Tetley, John Butler and Agnes de Mille.

Carmen de Lavallade succeeded her cousin Janet Collins as the principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera and was a guest artist with the American Ballet Theater. She has choreographed for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Philadanco, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the productions of Porgy and Bess and Die Meistersinger at the Metropolitan Opera.

Ms. de Lavallade also has had an extensive acting career performing in numerous off-Broadway productions including Death of a Salesman andOthello. She taught movement for actors at Yale and became a member of the Yale Repertory Company and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard.

She and her husband, Geoffrey Holder, were the subjects of the filmCarmen & Geoffrey (2005), which chronicled their sixty year partnership and artistic legacy. Her most recent work includes 651 ARTS’ FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance (2009), Step-Mother by Ruby Dee (2009), Post Black by Regina Taylor (2011), and the Broadway production of A Streetcar NamedDesire (2012).

Ms. de Lavallade is currently touring a dance/theater work about her life entitled As I Remember It, which premiered in June 2014. Lauded by numerous institutions, Ms. de Lavallade received the Dance Magazine Award in 1964, an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School in 2007, the Duke Ellington Fellowship Award, and the Dance USA Award in 2010. From Broadway to the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. de Lavallade has performed on the world’s greatest stages and with such legendary artists as Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Carmen de Lavallade: My show As I Remember It is not necessarily a dance piece and it’s not a theater piece. It’s a combined piece of theater and — I can’t say dance. I really at this time of my life I move, which is true. No, I have to be honest about this. The idea has been kind of brewing for a long time and I realized I wanted to talk about my journey and the people, the interesting, wonderful people who pass through my life and who made me who I am from — my parents and my teachers and the people that have come into my life. And the places that changed me like, of course, I grew up in Los Angeles, California, I think in a really interesting time. In the '30s so that was a difficult time for a lot of people to live, like Depression babies. And then when I get to New York it was in the '50s which was a wonderful time I think. It was really Oz for me. And then New Haven, which was a — where my whole life changed again because by the time I got to New York, I was mainly a dancer. But when I traveled to New Haven, it became a whole new world with the theater.

The theater and the dance for me, collided for me because I found out I missed — that was something I was missing in the dance world because it’s really like being in the military. It’s very regimented and then at the same time I was very fortunate that my mentor, Lester Horton, was anything but regimental.....

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