Carmen de Lavallade (born March 6, 1931) is an American actress, choreographer and dancer. For many years, she was associated with and married to Tony Award-winning actor, dancer, and director Geoffrey Holder. In 2017, she received the Kennedy Center Honors award for lifetime achievement and contributions to American culture.
De Lavallade began studying ballet with Melissa Blake at the age of 16. After graduation from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, she was awarded a scholarship to study dance with Lester Horton.[5]
Career
De Lavallade became a member of the Lester Horton Dance Theater in 1949 where she danced as a lead dancer until her departure for New York City with Alvin Ailey in 1954. Like all of Horton's students, she studied other art forms, including painting, acting, music, set design and costuming, as well as ballet and other forms of modern and ethnic dance. She studied dancing with ballerina Carmelita Maracci and acting with Stella Adler. In 1954, de Lavallade made her Broadway debut partnered with Alvin Ailey in Truman Capote's musical House of Flowers (starring Pearl Bailey).[6]
In 1955, she married dancer/actor Geoffrey Holder, whom she had met while working on House of Flowers.[7] It was with Holder that de Lavallade choreographed her signature solo Come Sunday, to a black spiritual sung by Odetta (then known as Odetta Gordon). The following year, de Lavallade danced as the prima ballerina in Samson and Delilah, and Aida at the Metropolitan Opera.[8][9]
De Lavallade was a principal guest performer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company on the company's tour of Asia and in some countries the company was billed as de Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company. Other performances included dancing with Donald McKayle and appearing in Agnes de Mille's American Ballet Theatre productions of The Four Marys and The Frail Quarry in 1965. At the insistence of friend John Butler,[11] she began teaching at the Yale School of Drama as a choreographer and performer-in-residence in 1970.
In 1996, de Lavallade, Gus Solomons jr. and Dudley Williams, started the dance collective PARADIGM,[13][14] a dance company for mature dancers over the age of 50. whose goal was to "promote and celebrate the talents of mature artists on stage".[15][16] PARADIGM toured and commissioned new dances by a variety of choreographers.[15]
In 2003, de Lavallade appeared in the rotating cast of the off-Broadway staged reading of Wit & Wisdom.[17] In 2010, she appeared in a one-night-only concert semi-staged reading of Evening Primrose by Stephen Sondheim.[18] In 2014, de Lavallade premiered her solo show As I Remember It. The work was a meditation on her history in dance through performance, film, and storytelling.[6]
Personal life
De Lavallade had resided in New York City with her husband Geoffrey Holder until his death on October 5, 2014.[19] Their lives were the subject of the 2005 Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob documentary Carmen and Geoffrey.[20] The couple had one son, Léo. De Lavallade's brother-in-law was Boscoe Holder.[21]