Carmen de Lavallade
*Carmen de Lavallade was born on this date in 1931. She is a Black actress, choreographer, dancer, and teacher.
De Lavallade was born in Los Angeles, California, to Creole parents from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised by her aunt, Adele, who owned one of Central Avenue's first African American history bookshops. De Lavallade's cousin, Janet Collins, was the first African descendant prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera. De Lavallade began studying ballet with Melissa Blake at 16.
After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, she was awarded a scholarship to study dance with Lester Horton. De Lavallade became a member of the Lester Horton Dance Theater in 1949, where she danced as a lead dancer until moving to 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, 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.
In 1955, she married dancer/actor Geoffrey Holder, whom she had met while working on House of Flowers. With Holder, 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 at the Metropolitan Opera. She made her television debut in John Butler's ballet Flight, and in 1957, she appeared in the television production of Duke Ellington's A Drum Is a Woman. She appeared in several off-Broadway productions, including Othello and Death of a Salesman. An introduction to 20th Century Fox executives by Lena Horne led to more acting roles between 1952 and 1955. She appeared in several films, including Carmen Jones (1954) with Dorothy Dandridge, Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) with Harry Belafonte, and Lone Star (1996).
De Lavallade was a principal guest performer on the Alvin Ailey Dance Company's tour of Asia. Other performances included dancing in Agnes de Mille's American Ballet Theatre productions of The Four Marys and The Frail Quarry in 1965. She began teaching at the Yale School of Drama as a choreographer and performer-in-residence in 1970. She staged musicals, plays, and operas and eventually became a professor and member of the Yale Repertory Theater. Between 1990 and 1993, de Lavallade returned to the Metropolitan Opera as choreographer for Porgy, Bess, and Die Meistersinger. In 1996, de Lavallade, Gus Solomons Jr., and Dudley Williams started the dance collective PARADIGM, a dance company for mature dancers over 50.
In 2003, de Lavallade appeared in the rotating cast of the off-Broadway staged reading of Wit & Wisdom. In 2010, she appeared in a one-night-only concert semi-staged reading of Evening Primrose. 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. De Lavallade and Holder had resided in New York City before his death. Their lives were the subject of the 2005 Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob documentary Carmen and Geoffrey. The couple had one son, Léo. In 2004, de Lavallade received the Black History Month Lifetime Achievement Award and the Rosie Award (named for Rosetta LeNoire and the Bessie Award in 2006, and the Capezio Dance Award in 2007, as well as an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York through Purchase College in 2006 and Juilliard School in 2008.
In 2016, de Lavallade received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Obie Awards for her excellence in off-Broadway theater. In 2017, she received the Kennedy Center Honors Award. On August 17, 2017, two days after U.S. President Trump's third statement after the "Charlottesville rally," she announced that she would forgo the related reception at the White House, which was later canceled. De Lavallade was an honoree at The New Jewish Home's Eight Over Eighty Gala 2017. In 2023, De Lavallade was presented with Richmond Ballet's Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award before performing John Butler's Carmina Burana at the Filene Center at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.
