League of Professional Theatre Women presents:

ORAL HISTORY: CARMEN DE LAVALLADE INTERVIEWED BY DEBORAH JOWITT

Monday, June 27, 2016, 6:00PM

Bruno Walter Auditorium

New York Public Library for the

Performing Arts at Lincoln Center

65th Street & Amsterdam Avenue

LPTW Members, Friends of the League, Board Members of New York Women’s Agenda and Women in the Arts & Media Coalition: 

FREE Admission, Seating First Come First Served.

Only LPTW members, Friends of the League, or members of our sister organizations are able to RSVP.

RSVP here with code: https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe.c/10083493

This program is produced by Betty Corwin
with Pat Addiss and Ludovica Villar-Hauser.

The Oral History program enjoys continued support from The Edith Meiser Foundation.

This program is made possible, in part, with public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

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 20th Century 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 of House 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. She succeeded her cousin Janet Collins as the principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera becoming the second black dancer to perform on that stage 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 as a member of the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard, performing in numerous off-Broadway productions, and as an instructor at the Yale School of Drama where she taught many up and coming “super stars,” including Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler. Her television and film credits include The Cosby Show, Sherri with Sherri Shepherd, John Sayles’ Lone Star and Big Daddy with Adam Sandler. She and her husband, Geoffrey Holder, were the subjects of the film Carmen & Geoffrey (2005), which chronicled their sixty year partnership and artistic legacy. Her most recent theatrical work includes Step-Mother by Ruby Dee (2009), Post Black by Regina Taylor (2011), and the Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire (2012). She is also a founding member of the dance company Paradigm. Ms. de Lavallade is currently touring an original dance/theater work about her life entitled As I Remember It, which premiered in June 2014 at Jacob’s Pillow. 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. In 1999, she was named by the Dance Heritage Coalition as one of America’s 100 Irreplaceable Dance Treasures. 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. Carmen de Lavallade has been an incomparable dance and theater treasure for more than six decades. In her eighties and still performing with a supreme level of grace and elegance, she is an icon in the truest sense of the word – inspiring generations of artists and audiences.

Deborah Jowitt began to dance professionally in the 1950s and to choreograph in the 1960s. She wrote about dance for The Village Voice from 1967 to 2011 and currently writes for artsjournal.com. She has published two collections, Dance Beat (1977) and The Dance in Mind (1985), as well as Time and the Dancing Image (1988) and Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (2004). Her current project is a critical biography of Martha Graham. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, She lectures and conducts workshops worldwide and teaches in the Dance Department of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.