Some Final Word By Carmen de Lavallade

Below is my piece on Carmen de Lavallade for Encore magazine..The great dancer, actor, teacher, choreographer died earlier this month at the age of 94.

“Curiosity,” said Carmen de Lavallade when asked why theatre artists continue to create, sometimes for decades after the time when people in other professions retire.

In her mid-80s de Lavallade toured with her solo show, ‘As I Remember It,’ talking about her life as a dancer, actor and teacher—and showing that she still had the right moves.

“Find a person who knows what they’re doing and study them,” she would advise young artists.“Always look to the best, not to copy them but to see what is it about them.”

A daughter of Creole parents, de Lavallade, now 90, began her professional dance career in the late ’40s and performed her artistry in theatre, film, television and on dance stages. Over the years, she worked with a wide range of legendary artists who knew exactly what they were doing: Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Ezra Pound,

Duke Ellington, Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille and Alvin Ailey, just to name a few. Her tip from Josephine Baker who saw Carmen at a curtain call: “You don’t bow long enough.”

When she was in Broadway’s “House of Flowers” in 1954, she met a handsome, tall (six-foot-six) castmate, Geoffrey Holder, whom she married. Together they were the height of elegance and the epitome of grace. Other New York credits followed: “Hot Spot,” J”osephine

Baker,” “Othello,” “The House of Bernarda Alba,” “Three Sisters”— and a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” when she was in her early 80s. In the 1970s de Lavallade became resident artist, choreographer and professor in the early days of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the revitalized School of Drama under Robert Brustein.

One of her students, Meryl Streep, says de Lavallade was not only a teacher of movement and a mentor, but “a light. That expanse of joy, more than any lesson, more than any method, gave us an understanding of what it takes to sustain happiness in an uncertain profession, in an uncertain world.”

De Lavallade admonished young dancers for being on their cellphones all the time by stating, “Put those things down and go hug a tree.” The dancers later sent her a picture of them around an oak. “Good,” she wrote back. “Now look up.”