Research Catalog

Interview with Lar Lubovitch

Title: Interview with Lar Lubovitch, 2021 / Conducted remotely by Marina Harss on July 7, 8, 9, and 12, 2021; Producer: Dance Oral History Project.
Author: Lubovitch, Lar, 1943-
Publication: 2021

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Status	Vol/Date	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Performing Arts Research Collections Dance to submit a request in person.	Part 2 of 2	Moving image	Supervised use	*MGZMT 3-3514 Part 2 of 2	Performing Arts Research Collections Dance
Available - Can be used on site. Please visit New York Public Library - Performing Arts Research Collections Dance to submit a request in person.	Part 1 of 2	Moving image	Supervised use	*MGZMT 3-3514 Part 1 of 2	Performing Arts Research Collections Dance

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Additional Authors

Harss, Marina

Description

4 streaming video files (7 hours and 2 minutes)d: sound, color. +

Summary

Streaming file 1, July 7, 2021 (approximately one hour and 44 minutes). Lar Lubovitch speaks with Marina Harss about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected him, in particular causing him to realize that he wanted to continue choreographing; his childhood on Maxwell Street in Chicago (Illinois) and family background including the place and year of his birth (Chicago; 1943); his parents' laissez-faire approach to his upbringing and his tendency to be a loner; an anecdote about choreographing a dance with his teddy bear when he around three years old; reminiscences of making pictures around age four and his delight at being called an artist; finding inspiration for his artwork in pictures he saw in magazines; his sense of line and shape as stronger than his sense of color; his formal training in art including his after-school classes (between ages 12 and 18) with Helen Hale; finding himself drawn to the art of [Pablo] Picasso and why he preferred abstract art to the realism of the "old masters" in painting; his self-description as socially-introverted and emotionally-extroverted; his skill at dancing to the extent that his high school nickname was "the dancer"; his affinity for classical music, which he listened to while painting; learning popular dances from television including American Bandstand; his reasons for joining his school's gymnastics team including his dislike of contact sports; in 1960 matriculating at the University of Iowa with an art scholarship; his introduction to dance by Marsha Thayer; seeing the José Limón Dance Company perform and immediately deciding to become a dancer; attending the American Dance Festival where he took class with Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey among others; (in 1962) auditioning for the Juilliard School and being awarded a full scholarship; his impressions of Graham and her class including as contrasted with José Limón and his class; reminiscences of Ailey and his class; returning to the University of Iowa for one semester (between the Festival and entering Juilliard) where he danced and choreographed; decades later receiving a copy of a film that had been made of his performance of the solo he had created for his Juilliard audition [short pause in recording]; more on the solo; an anecdote about learning the word "choreography" when he was around eight years old; his time at Juilliard including his teachers Antony Tudor, Louis Horst, Graham, Limón, and Donald McKayle; reminiscences of McKayle and Tudor, who were major influences in his life; Tudor's ballet class, in particular the music he used; what he learned from seeing [George] Balanchine's ballets; the Balanchine works that appealed to him most on an emotional level including Serenade and Apollo; his lack of awareness of the schism between ballet and modern dance and consequent free use of the language of both; his view of Merce Cunningham's work as intellectual rather than emotional; leaving Juilliard before graduating; making his living by dancing (including go-go dancing at clubs) while taking classes at various schools; the unique feeling of freedom he had when he was dancing at discos; his desire to have this feeling whenever he danced and to embody it in his choreography.
Streaming file 2, July 8, 2021 (approximately one hour and 45 minutes). Lar Lubovitch speaks with Marina Harss about his identity as a dancer; his dancing with many small companies on a pick-up basis while supporting himself with his go-go dancing; joining Harkness Ballet, his first, full time job as a company member; the quality of the repertoire as contrasted with the excellence of the dancers; his impressions of Rebekah Harkness; (briefly) studying the Cecchetti method with Margaret Craske and Alfredo Corvino; reasons he was not able to realize his hope of choreographing while in the company possibly including anti-Semitism; in 1968, choreographing a concert program presented at the Kaufmann Concert Hall [at the 92nd St. Y], which included three works: Freddie's bag, Blue, and Forgotten time, forgotten place; ceasing to paint after he started to dance; his choreographing as a means of painting space and music; his visualizing of music as shapes; his choreographic process including his approach to the music and the steps, as illustrated by his work North star; how his first concert was received: well by the audience and less well by the critic Clive Barnes; immediately after the concert, getting commissions from overseas companies including the Bat-Dor Dance Company in Israel and Ballet Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Portugal; by 1969, touring with his own company (Lar Lubovitch Dance Company), which was financially possible due to the National Endowment for the Arts' grants to universities; the pressures of having to choreograph multiwork programs and finding the money to pay his dancers; around 1975 disbanding the Company (which he later reconstituted); choreographing for other companies and doing some guest-teaching after the Company disbanded; his relative lack of involvement in the political and social upheavals of the late 1960s; his work Whirligogs; his concern with racial inequality since childhood; Scherzo for Massah Jack, his work for American Ballet Theatre, which was inspired by music by Charles Ives [Trio for violin, cello & piano]; how he feels about this work now; his feeling that his choreography tells the story of the music; his belief that every choreographer should have a unique "language" or style; developing his own "language"; the sense of inevitability [of the movements] or "correctness" that is characteristic of good choreography; the range from "bad" to "correct" of his own work; names some of the approximately dozen dances that he considers his best or "totally correct"; how his self-doubt has stimulated his choreographic process; his head injury (subdural hematoma) early in his career and his complete recovery; his works Brahms Symphony and Concerto six twenty-two, both of which were very successful and set to music familiar to him; turning to unfamiliar music, beginning with Steve Reich; [in 1977] creating Marimba [Marimba: a trance dance], to music by Reich [Music for mallets, voices & organ] for Maurice Béjart's Ballet du XXe Siècle; subsequently creating other works set to music by minimalist composers including North star and how using this kind of music changed his choreographic process; Harss notes that Concerto six twenty-two and Brahms Symphony were created in 1985 and Lubovitch agrees; he speaks about how he had "found" Reich in 1975, which led to a change in his choreographic process; how eventually, feeling that he was not being completely true to himself, he created Brahms Symphony; how these explorations with minimalist composers led to the expansion of his choreographic tools; his work Cavalcade including a method whereby he had the dancers create the steps; the mathematical method he used to choreograph Marimba including the possibility that this method reflected the influence of Cunningham's choreography; reasons he stopped performing but continued dancing and taking class; reminiscences of Mark Morris, who had been a member of the Company; his concurrence with Morris' description (in Out loud: a memoir by Mark Morris and Wesley Stace, c.2019) of Lubovitch as "stormy"; the reasons he was and is "stormy"; the 1970s as the period of the "dance explosion," when dance was at a creative peak; more on the journey that began with his exploration of minimalism and eventual return to what he felt was his true self with Brahms Symphony; his better understanding of the type of technique this style required and the group of excellent dancers he had assembled by then; the factors he looks for in a dancer, including an innate poetic ability; his affinity for [Johannes] Brahms' music, due to its curviness, which is also characteristic of his choreography.
Streaming file 3, July 9, 2021 (approximately one hour and 55 minutes). Lar Lubovitch speaks with Marina Harss about the music of [Johannes] Brahms and how his choreography echoes some of its characteristic qualities; his male dances including the duet from Concerto six twenty-two; Antony Tudor's view that one should only choreograph what is within one's life experience; his work Men's stories: a concerto in ruin, in particular its theme of how men are ruined by society's expectations regarding "masculine" behavior; Concerto six twenty-two and its theme of friendship as his response to the AIDS crisis; Dancing for Life, the [1987] AIDS fund-raising gala, the idea of which he initiated and which included the duet for two men from Concerto six twenty-two; the enormous response to the duet as well as its subsequent emblematic status with respect to the struggle against AIDS; his original intent as not having been to make a political statement; the many individual responses he has received and continues to receive in response to this dance; the idea for Concert six-twenty-two as having originated with the death from AIDS of his close friend Ernest Pagnano; the two dancers most closely associated with the duet: Sylvain LaFortune and Rick Michalek; his use of the music of [Wolfgang Amadeus] Mozart in his work including how the choreography he set to Mozart differs from that set to Brahms; his sensitivity to criticism and why he no longer reads reviews of his work; more on Dancing for Life; choreographing for ice dancing, initially at the invitation of John Curry; his work Tilt-a-whirl, a duet created for Curry and Peggy Fleming; certain aspects of choreographing for ice dancing; the "swinging lubo", a movement he created; his most successful ice dances including Tilt-a-whirl, The Sleeping Beauty, for an English television production, and The Planets (set to Gustav Holst's Planets), for a Canadian television production; the combining of ice dancing and "conventional" dancing in The Planets, the latter part of which Doug Varone choreographed; working with skaters as compared with dancers; working with ballet dancers as compared with [modern] dancers including Morris' comment on the subject; the nature of the choreography he has created for ballet dancers including his almost exclusive use of soft shoes; his ballet Othello, which was commissioned by Kevin McKenzie for American Ballet Theatre; reasons Lubovitch chose this story for the ballet and his use of multiple sources for the libretto including the Shakespeare play, [Giuseppe] Verdi's and [Giacomo] Rossini's operas, and the short story by Cintio [Giovanni Battista Giraldi]; the parameters he set for himself in creating this work including his decision not to use any pantomime; how he came to commission Eliot Goldenthal to compose the music including the composer's facility with tarantellas; working with Goldenthal; his conception and development of the character Othello; his [2016] work The bronze horseman, (based on Alexander Pushkin's poem), which was commissioned by the Mikhailovsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia; the challenges and rewards of working with the Mikhailovsky Ballet dancers; his impressions of Russian dancers and their training generally; musicals he has worked on including Into the woods (musical staging), The red shoes (choreography), and The King and I (musical staging; the choreography by Jerome Robbins was preserved); how the for-profit sensibility of Broadway productions often drives much of the artistic decision-making; his sense that Broadway productions required his craft rather than his art; more on The King and I; more on The red shoes; the "recycling" of the ballet he created for The red shoes in productions by American Ballet Theatre and other companies; his work Little rhapsodies, for three men; his work Dvořák Serenade, which he choreographed simultaneously with Little rhapsodies; how he uses drawings of shapes to choreograph, including in the case of Men's stories; more on his choreographic process generally.
Streaming file 4, July 12, 2021 (approximately one hour and 38 minutes). Lar Lubovitch speaks with Marina Harss about his 2011 work Crisis variations including how it was inspired by his reading about a fatal traffic accident; his choice of music [also titled Crisis variations], which he commissioned Yevgeniy Sharlat to write based on a work by [Franz] Liszt; the choreographic process he employed; his 2012 work Transparent things including its inspiration in the music of Claude Debussy and the painting Les Saltimbanques [Family of Saltimbanques] by Picasso; qualities he looks for in dancers; the dynamic relationship between his choreographic process and the dancers with whom he is working; his 2018 work Something about night including his intent that it be a valedictory work; his subsequent decision to continue choreographing; his choice of music (Franz Schubert) for Something about night; reasons he does not want to repeat himself choreographically including his view of what it means to be an artist; reasons he likes to use duets in his choreography; the duet in his work Fandango including the origin of its title in the original title of [Maurice] Ravel's Bolero; his co-founding with Jay Franke of the Chicago Dancing Festival in 2006 including the curation process; the success and subsequent expansion of the Festival; reasons he enjoys curating dance programs; NY Quadrille at the Joyce Theater including his redesign of the stage for this program; his interest in seeing other choreographers' work; how he came to teach at the University of California, Irvine; his belief that he is an excellent coach but does not know how to teach technique; his belief that choreography cannot be taught, hence the structuring of his choreography class as a laboratory of imagination; his use of exercises to help students expand their imaginations including exercises that explore the physical manifestation of emotions; the role of music (and the arts) in helping one understand oneself; how the unironic and sincere character of his work has led to the (unfounded) criticism that it is lacking in depth; his view of irony and why it has no place in his art; regardless of trends, having always only made work that he feels is true to himself; how he defines musicality in the context of choreography; reasons he finds the creative process to be difficult including his self-doubts and how he deals with this; the role of technique in his work; his characterizing of the distinctive type of movement seen in his works as a style rather than as a technique; how his dancers prepare in the absence of company class including doing ballet barre, yoga, and Pilates; works that were pivotal to him as a choreographer: his minimalist dances Marimba and North star, Brahms symphony, which represented a return to his true self, and Men's stories; choreographers whose work he feels he has influenced including Morris and Varone; his close relationship with many of his former students; how he thinks about his legacy; his recent copyrighting for the first time of certain of his works and plans for their disposition; hyperphantasia as the term for his kind of imagination; how the relative commercialization of (non-profit) dance has influenced choreographers to make work that are more likely to appeal to audiences and hence promoters; his work The black rose, which depicts rape and pregnancy, and caused him to lose a tour due to its subject-matter.

Alternative Title

Dance Oral History Project.
Dance Audio Archive.

Subject

Genre/Form

Video recordings.
Oral histories.

Note

Interview with Lar Lubovitch in New York State conducted remotely by Marina Harss in New York, N.Y. on July 7, 8, 9, and 12, 2021, for the Dance Oral History Project of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
For transcript see *MGZMT 3-3514
The video recording of this interview can be made available at the Library for the Performing Arts by advanced request to the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, dance@nypl.org. The video files for this interview are undergoing processing and eventually will be available for streaming.
Title supplied by cataloger.

Access (note)

Photography of the transcript permitted for research purposes only.

Funding (note)

The creation and cataloging of this recording was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, 2022 and Nathanson [form for Nathanson?].

Call Number

*MGZMT 3-3514

OCLC

1425974164

Author

Lubovitch, Lar, 1943- Interviewee.

Title

Interview with Lar Lubovitch, 2021 / Conducted remotely by Marina Harss on July 7, 8, 9, and 12, 2021; Producer: Dance Oral History Project.

Imprint

2021

Playing Time

070200

Type of Content

spoken word

two-dimensional moving image

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

video

computer

Type of Carrier

online resource

volume

Digital File Characteristics

video file

Restricted Access

Photography of the transcript permitted for research purposes only.

Event

Recorded for for the Dance Oral History Project of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts 2021, July 7, 8, 9, and 12 New York (N.Y.).

Funding

The creation and cataloging of this recording was made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, 2022 and Nathanson [form for Nathanson?].

Connect to:

Added Author

Harss, Marina, Interviewer.

Research Call Number

*MGZMT 3-3514

*MGZDOH 3514

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