Back to the Boards : Bella Lewitzky is again focusing her energies on her own company after a bittersweet end to her dream for L.A.’s Dance Gallery

If one word could describe the 76th year of Bella Lewitzky’s life, it would surely be bittersweet . Just as she is commemorating the silver anniversary of her acclaimed dance company, a longtime dream has been dashed.

Frequently cited among the top modern dance troupes in the United States--and one of the few not based in New York--the Lewitzky Dance Company has been groundbreaking in several regards. Lewitzky herself is especially revered as a teacher and mentor, one who has fostered generations of L.A. dancers.

“She was an extraordinary and rare role model, a powerful woman who was every bit as strong as the men in society,” says Loretta Livingston, one of the most prominent Lewitzky veterans and now director of her own company.

“Here was a woman who danced into her 60s, a woman who never compromised,” continues Livingston, who moved to Los Angeles to study with Lewitzky at CalArts in the early ‘70s and spent a decade-long “apprenticeship” with the choreographer. “She represents integrity, quality and enduring artistic values.”

Most important, Lewitzky has proved that it’s possible to make a major international career in modern dance apart from the New York scene. By paying her dancers a living wage and demanding a high level of technical execution, she has also given L.A. a professional standard for modern dance that was inconceivable before she came along.

Despite the successes, one Lewitzky dream apparently won’t come true. On Jan. 17, Lewitzky resigned as artistic director of the Dance Gallery, an unbuilt facility more than 15 years in the planning that was to be home to her company. Her resignation came on the day that the Dance Gallery board of directors announced an agreement in principle with the R. D. Colburn School of the Performing Arts, a 800-student school currently housed on South Figueroa Street. The Colburn school will provide the final $5 million needed for the project, in return for which it will share the proposed facility at 4th and Olive streets.

“It seemed the right time to have the Dance Gallery well on its way to achieving its own goals and (for) me to return to my goals,” Lewitzky says of the reportedly amicable parting. “The gallery found its donor, and they should be able to set their own path at this point.”

As the Dance Gallery is now envisioned, it will no longer provide for the Lewitzky Dance Company to be in residence. So there was little reason for Lewitzky to remain as artistic director. “This is not the time to add funding for a company,” she says. “It was logical that they had no plans for a resident company at the point that they (decided) to join the Colburn School.”

The severing of this relationship marks the end of an ambitious dream. Yet Lewitzky says it will free her to devote all her energies once again to her company in its 25th year, and to the demanding aesthetic for which she is known.

“I am plagued with perfectionism,” she says. “I used to think it was a backward manifestation of ego. But another part of me said that it’s healthy. Since perfection can never be achieved, you’ll never stand still. I have never stopped teaching. I have never stopped choreographing.”

Born in 1916 in Llano del Rio, a utopian socialist commune on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Lewitzky (the Ellis Island Anglicization of the original family name) was raised by her Russian immigrant parents on a chicken ranch near San Bernardino.

With the open spaces of the Inland Empire as her backdrop, she started to make dances even as a young girl. Then, when the Depression cost the family the farm and Lewitzky moved to Los Angeles with her father, an amateur painter named Joseph, she began ballet lessons.

Her creativity was limited by the strictures of that traditional approach, though, and she moved on to work with modern-dance pioneer Lester Horton, eventually becoming “his movement instrument,” as she puts it. “He fashioned a technique on me.”

With her perfectionist proclivities, Lewitzky also became Horton’s right hand. “I could advance whatever he’d started choreographically,” she explains. “And because Lester Horton’s passion was for large groups and pageantry, it fell on me--by my own choice--to see that everybody could distinguish their left from their right foot.

“Lester couldn’t have cared less about whether they did or did not move perfectly, but I could not stand to be on the stage with people who didn’t dance well.”

Unsalaried if not unworked, Lewitzky made ends meet with commercial jobs in film and stage. She schooled Agnes de Mille’s dancers for “Oklahoma!”--a show that transformed the American musical into a medium in which music and dance functioned as key components of the narrative.

It was also at the Horton studios that Lewitzky met her husband, architect Newell Reynolds. In the 51 years they have been married, he has been a frequent collaborator, designing the house they live in, her studio and various dance sets and serving on the Dance Gallery board.

Their daughter Nora--also a choreographer--was born when Lewitzky was 39. Eleven years later, at age 50, Bella founded the Lewitzky Dance Company.

It was quite a change from her experiences with Horton--intentionally so. “I wanted only people who had a high level of commitment and talent,” Lewitzky says, referring back to her days with Horton’s uneven troupe. “I began with this group of six women who had studied with me.”

The company, which now includes both men and women and numbers 11, had a sound, if less-then-auspicious, beginning. “We started a tour and I gave them each a check,” Lewitzky says. “That was terribly important to me, because I felt dancers deserved the dignity of being paid. But when I wrote the checks, they all sent them back. I was the only one amongst them who didn’t earn a living (at a second job). It was an amusing beginning to a company which I now can support most of the year round.”

The first breakthrough came shortly thereafter, thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts. “What made it possible for my company to exist was the National Endowment for the Arts’ dance touring program,” Lewitzky says. “Even though their funding was hardly enough to stay alive on, we could raise seven dollars (from other sources) for every one of the NEA dollars. It was like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

The irony was great, therefore, when Lewitzky found herself at loggerheads with the NEA during its recent political turmoil. In June, 1990, Lewitzky announced that she would reject a $72,000 NEA grant and that she would file suit against the federal agency based on a clause requiring recipients to pledge not to create obscene work.

“I filed suit against the NEA because I loved it and it was shooting itself in the foot,” she says. “I could recognize what I saw on the NEA document I was to sign better than most because it wore the same clothing (as a McCarthy-era loyalty oath).”

Lewitzky announced her grant rejection and legal action from the steps of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the same spot where she had years earlier told reporters why she wouldn’t answer the House Un-American Activities Committee’s questions (“I am a dancer, not a singer ,” she had quipped).

“Once you remove the great devil of communism, what does the reactionary right rally around?” she asks rhetorically. “Here is the poor, defenseless artist whose method of work is to be alone.”

There were, however, key differences in Lewitzky’s HUAC and NEA encounters. “During the McCarthy period, there was such terror that your best friend would be apt not to speak to you if you had been placed on a blacklist,” she says. “This time, artists rallied.”

It was hailed as a victory for the arts when, on Jan. 9, 1991, U.S. District Judge John G. Davies struck down on constitutional grounds the NEA requirement that grantees sign the anti-obscenity pledge.

“This judge listened to all of those support briefs that came in--from artists, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Theater Communications Group and how many hundred-plus theaters,” Lewitzky says of her successful court action. “So one message here is, if you think you’re wasting your time sending letters to Congress or in defense of cases, you are not.”

It was yet another triumph in a life marked by a political activism rare among dancers. “I’ve always been an outspoken political activist,” Lewitzky says. ‘I belonged to the Anti-Fascist League. I fought for the rights for black dancers to be able to win scholarships in white schools long ago in the ‘40s.”

She knows, however, that the battles aren’t over. “Look at the ballet companies still--there’s mostly a token black,” she notes. “It’s better than it was. There was never even a token before. But one doesn’t wipe out racial prejudice easily. It’s going to take generations before people are accepted for what they are.”

While the Lewitzky Dance Company is respected as one of the top modern-dance groups in the United States--having toured in 43 states and 16 countries on four continents since it formed--the choreographer hasn’t had an easy road to hoe, facing obstacles in L.A. that she wouldn’t have encountered in New York.

“It began almost accidentally,” Lewitzky says of her company. “I never said, ‘Now I want to form an international touring dance company.’ It grew without my having the feeling that I had to sacrifice to make it happen or fight incredible odds.

“I have had support in the community of L.A. of all kinds except monetary,” she continues. “Of course, good wishes don’t pay the rent or the dancers, so that’s been a struggle.”

Why, then, did she insist on forging ahead with a career in what seems to be a hostile environment? “My creative juices matured in Los Angeles,” she says. “I’ve lived here all my life and I love it. It did impede my capacity to compete with companies from New York. The West Coast is not considered to be important when you go into the market.”

Yet her choreography has gained esteem in that market. Noted for her rigorous attention to technique, Lewitzky creates dances that combine a precise Western athleticism with a compelling emotionalism.

“Changes and Choices” (1981), performed earlier this month at Occidental College, features a series of dramatic falls. Times dance writer Lewis Segal said that “the dancing reached a level of meticulously calibrated power.” “Spaces Between” (1974), also performed at Occidental and the dance that many consider to be Lewitzky’s trademark, includes dancers traversing a glass panel suspended above the floor, as other dancers beneath mirror their movements.

Even though such dances as these are now held in high regard, they were created in spite of, not thanks to, the peculiar characteristics of their creator’s home base. Apart from the traditional disdain of the West by the East, L.A.’s problems stem from the inability of its companies to pay their dancers.

“The dance companies here have such a hard time finding trained dancers with whom to craft their art form and grow,” Lewitzky says. “Because there are so few companies who hire dancers professionally, the talented dancers go elsewhere.”

Former student Livingston, who formed her company in the mid-’80s, says: “It’s easier for someone to be known sooner if they’re in New York. Handicaps exist in the bias toward funding people from the East Coast. But I’m a Westerner. And there again, (Lewitzky) was a role model, a native Californian who represented the ability to be a maverick.”

Still, even with success stories like Livingston’s, the city has markedly few companies. “It speaks badly that we don’t have three or four companies supporting dancers, that we have one or two only, and some that support for performances only,” Lewitzky says.

The lack of monetary support isn’t peculiar to dance. “I don’t think Los Angeles has a history of financial support for the arts,” says the choreographer. “When you’re looking at foundations and capital-investing companies, there aren’t any in Los Angeles. The only one that really has given to the arts--and is now, like all other such industries, pulling back--is Arco.”

As for individual donors, it’s a case of too few patrons for too many causes. “The few who give are drained,” Lewitzky says. “A handful of people can’t support that many art groups. There has to be a better base.”

Even her hopes for such recently institutionalized public-sector money pools as the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, administered by the City’s Cultural Affairs Department, are guarded.

“I am proud of the city’s Endowment for the Arts,” she says. “It just has to watch its giving program. It tends to give to social services, not the arts. If the art is strong and good, it will serve all things well. You can’t reverse (those priorities) and advance the art form.”

In addition to money woes, L.A. has also suffered from a lack of venues. “I don’t think that Los Angeles has said that it’s important for dance to have spaces in which it can afford to perform,” Lewitzky says. “To me, that is a city obligation. Name a venue that a young dancer can afford. There aren’t any. And when there were, they went down.”

One step forward for local dance came in 1984, when Lewitzky programmed the 26 dance events of the Olympic Arts Festival, including the premiere of her own “Nos Duraturi,” a large-scale work with striking contrasts of tension and endurance set to Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”

“When international companies come into California, usually the local area feels quite left alone and depressed,” she says. “When I was putting together the Olympic Arts Festival, I was determined that we would have two weeks of California dance.”

Partly as a response to the lack of venues afforded Los Angeles dance, Lewitzky first conceived of the Dance Gallery in the mid-’70s. It was to be a home base for her company and a place to nurture young choreographers, the most extensive dance complex in the country, with the first theater designed especially for dance--a non-proscenium, 1,000-seat house--as well as studios, a training institute, a library and more.

The Bunker Hill facility was originally to have been completed in time for the Olympic Arts Festival and to be located at 4th Street and Grand Avenue, a site that was eventually lost. Another completion deadline was set for 1986, at an estimated cost of $12 million.

Stymied and put off again and again, the Dance Gallery had become one of the great cultural question marks of the local scene. In recent years, many have doubted that it would ever come to be.

“There are a lot of factors,” Lewitzky says of the repeated delays. “At one point the developers asked that we have all of our money up front in cash within a period of six months. Mind you, the developers themselves had not one penny in cash.

“It was obviously a totally unrealistic objective,” she says. “I think they wished we would drop dead.” The Dance Gallery was put on hold just when the capital campaign had begun--a break that Lewitzky says cost crucial fund-raising momentum.

Even without a facility of its own, the Dance Gallery began to present dance, starting with the 1984 Olympic Art Festival. And in 1990, Lewitzky launched her “In the Works” series, in which choreographers both presented their wares and spoke to the audiences about the creation of those works.

The Dance Gallery also brought William Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet to Los Angeles and, more recently, played host to Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus’ Ultima Vez company at Occidental College.

In October, 1990, Martin I. Kagan, a former executive director of OPERA America with 15 years of arts administration experience, became the new president and chief executive officer of the Dance Gallery. It was hoped that he would bring new resources to the project, then budgeted at $20 million.

Last April, Kagan announced a deadline of Dec. 31 to raise the remaining $5 million on the project, whose price tag had by then risen to $25 million. When the end of 1991 rolled around, the Dance Gallery postponed any announcement yet again. Finally, the new direction was made public at the Dance Gallery board meeting on Jan. 17.

The $5 million from the Colburn school joins $5.5 million from the Community Redevelopment Agency, $1 million from Bunker Hill Associates (developers of California Plaza) and approximately $2 million in cash and pledges. Tax-exempt bonds will pay for the rest of the construction costs.

Although the Lewitzky Dance Company board and the Dance Gallery board were initially one and the same and the Lewitzky foundation “gave birth” to the Dance Gallery, the two entities are now separate. However, Lewitzky says, “I have always had a handful (of members) that were on both boards.”

Lewitzky herself will finally get away from the business of fund-raising and back to the business of her company. “It’s good and appropriate,” she says. “I no longer have the energy to handle the separate jobs.”

And like the choreographer herself, the medium with which she has so long been associated will continue to make its way in Los Angeles, no matter what the nature of the Dance Gallery.

“Modern dance is such a maverick. It has always been an iconoclastic form,” Lewitzky says. “It will change. But I have every confidence that it will continue in L.A. There’s always going to be some visionary. Change for me is the only constant in life, and we’re in a period of change.”