Tony Nominee Steps In as UCI Dance Professor

Five-time Tony nominee Donald McKayle sounds a bit amused about his recent appointment as “permanent professor”’ of dance at UC Irvine.

“I have, what is the word-- tenure ?” he asked in a recent phone interview. “I have to learn all the jargon.”

But don’t be misled. McKayle has taught at a number of prestigious schools, conservatories and private studios, including the Juilliard School of Music, Bennington College in Vermont and California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (as dean of the School of Dance for two years, as well as a faculty member, from 1970-75).

“They all have their pluses and minuses,” McKayle said. “But when you get a good bunch of students--people who want to work--at a university system, you know that you have them for a while, and you can watch their development. In some of the other areas, it can be somewhat transitory.”

McKayle will teach choreography and modern dance technique and “special projects which I will be able to tell you more about after I have a chance to know the student body, the faculty and the facilities.” His classes at UCI begin Sept. 25.

“I thought that if I were going to give time to teaching, it was better to attach to some place that I felt would be a good place. Then I would tend not to go and come so much.”

A distinguished choreographer and dancer, McKayle was born in New York in 1930. After studies with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, among others, he went on to join a number of modern dance troupes and worked not only with Graham and Cunningham, but with Doris Humphrey, Charles Weideman, Jose Limon--”all the early pioneers of dance,” McKayle said.

“There are things I can call upon on a moment’s notice that will explain particular movements. . . . It’s all part of man’s invention and reinvention and refilling this thing called the movement of the body.”

McKayle began choreographing in 1948 with such works as “Saturday’s Child,” based on a poem by Countee Cullen. “Games,” created in 1951, has entered the repertory of the Alvin Ailey Repertory Workshop, Gloria Newman Dance Company, Ballet Hispanico of New York and, in January, Lula Washington’s Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theater in Los Angeles.

Other works include “They Call Her Moses” (1953), “Rainbow Round My Shoulder” (1959) and “District Storyville,” (1961), among others. But even though such pieces focused upon the complexities of the black experience, McKayle, who is black, always worked with an integrated company.

“Some of the pieces I’ve done, which were celebrated when done as part of the black tradition, I look back at the original companies and they were always a mixed group.” Rather than attempt to use black dancers exclusively, McKayle said, “I simply found people who were wonderful and said, ‘I’m doing a dance, would you like to be in it?’ ”

McKayle had his own company from 1951-69, and subsequently headed the now-defunct Inner City Dance Company in Los Angeles.

Eventually, however, Broadway, film and television captured his attention. He has received five Tony nominations for choreography in such Broadway shows as “Golden Boy” (1964), “Raisin” (1974) and “Sophisticated Ladies” (1981), and various awards and nominations for his film and television work.

But his later concert dances--in which he ventured into more abstract movement--never won the same critical respect that his earlier pieces found. Some purists also have questioned his career mix of serious art and commercial work.

“I’ve never thought purity was something to be worshipped,” McKayle responded. “I also feel that people develop and change. . . . I have a broad approach to the art form. I’m not looking for it in one place.”

He sees that broad experience as a benefit for his students.

“That whole history will be revealed as I work,” he said. “It should be part of the knowledge you have being at a university--how things were, how they developed. . . .

“And having worked in so many different media and with so many different kinds of approaches to dance, I’ve also been very interested in developing the individual aesthetic of the student. That I think is very important--to recognize offbeat talent and to nurture it.

“I feel that one thing that is very important is that the students that come to us should have the ability to go in any direction they want to go. I can train someone to pursue what they have in their mind, not pace them into any one area or another. I don’t feel that is the job of teaching.”

McKayle shows no signs of slowing down. He is writing an autobiography for Duke University Press, getting ready to move “Stardust,” a musical he choreographed that has been playing in Florida, to the Kennedy Center in Washington, early next year, and finishing a four-year project with the American Dance Festival called “The Black Tradition in Modern Dance.”

“I feel it’s important to have active professional people working with students, as well as faculty that are purely academic,” he said. “I think it’s important to fit themselves into the professional world, so it won’t come as a great shock to them later.”