A 70-Year Dance Dynasty

Exactly 70 years ago this month, a young man from Indianapolis named Lester Horton came West to stage a dance-pageant in Eagle Rock. Fascinated with Southland flora and fauna, he stuck around, got increasingly inspired by the possibilities of movement expression and ended up choreographing an influential repertory, evolving a distinctive modern dance technique and founding a potent creative dynasty.

From Horton in 1928 to dancer/choreographer Michael Mizerany in 1998, that dynasty’s line of descent is unbroken, and for sustained achievement alone its members arguably represent the First Family of L.A. modernism.

Yes, other major choreographers worked here before and after Horton--but largely in isolation, with little trace of them remaining on the current dance landscape. And yes, there’s also a well known East Coast branch of the Horton family fathered by the late Alvin Ailey.

But in the local community the Horton heritage still looms large and it’s no accident that the annual achievement awards for Southland concert dance are named after him, or that they’ve often been monopolized by such members of the clan as Mizerany, Loretta Livingston and family matriarch Bella Lewitzky.

Along with former Lewitzky dancer Fred Strickler--who took the Horton legacy into the new world of concert tap--this group of active artists represents a kind of maverick dance strain, dead-serious about creativity but insisting against all odds on working here, far from the central marketplace or capital of American modernism.

And other family resemblances link them as well: stratospheric technical standards, for starters; a sophisticated sense of spatial design; and, in particular, what Strickler calls “the clarity of the body in space and its relationship to the architecture of the theater space.”

Not to mention originality. “None of these people are imitators,” Lewitzky said recently in a conversation about the local Horton family of choreographers. “I think the commonality is the need to invent and a boldness that brings out individuality. That boldness runs right through from Lester to all of us. You imagine it, you do it. You do not imitate.”

On Friday, the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series celebrates 10 years at Cal State L.A. with a program of works by Southern California dance pioneers, preceded by the 1998 Horton Awards. Two Horton duets will be danced on that program (one of them newly restaged by Lewitzky) plus an Ailey trio. A Mizerany work turns up the following night on the series and a week later Livingston choreography is scheduled on a Kaleidoscope bill at the Japan America Theatre. On Aug. 21 and 22 Strickler and Mizerany appear on a Feet Speak program in the Keck Theater at Occidental College.

With all this Horton-family activity, plus a legion of unseen ex-dancers and their students prominent in local academic circles or working in the other performing arts, it’s a good time to look at the values that each Horton generation took from those who came before--and also what each generation added to the legacy.

But first, the lowdown on Lester Horton himself. Tall, barrel-chested and short-legged, he was not ideally built for dance nor was he notable as a technician. But he was savvy about the theater and design and able to develop in others what he lacked himself.

Back in 1934--the year in which he formed his Dance Group and Lewitzky began taking classes from him--The Times praised him for “dramatic strength” as a performer. And dramatic strength was a quality he focused on through pieces about social injustice, poverty and violence against women.

Moreover, long before “multiculturalism” and “nontraditional casting” became buzzwords, Horton choreographed works based on Asian, African, Caribbean, Latin American and, especially, Native American cultures, mixing dancers of different ethnicities and body types. This was news--the first established multiracial dance company in America--and in 1948 Horton opened on Melrose the first theater in this country created solely for the presentation of modern dance.

By that time, Lewitzky had become both his leading dancer and the instrument through which he developed what is now known as Horton technique.

The process built Lewitzky into a powerhouse virtuoso. “I’m a believer and if he asked me to do something, it never entered my mind that it couldn’t be done,” she recalls. After she left the company in 1950, Horton technique was codified and then, following his death in 1953, taken East by such resident Hortonites as Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade. Today the Ailey school in New York is the acknowledged international center for it and the Ailey repertory its most widely known showcase.

“Alvin put Horton on the map,” says Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Ailey company. “Without him and a few others, Horton technique would have stayed out there in California. I think what he did was promote the lexicon by producing it in a series of dances, some of which are classics. Near the end of [Ailey’s 1960 masterwork] ‘Revelations,’ the ‘I Want to Be Ready’ solo is practically straight from the Horton syllabus. People still don’t realize that it is almost pure Horton technique.”

Jamison describes that technique as “very forthright, a very pure way of moving that emphasizes angularity, powerful strength, the ability to take chances and find out what it’s like to achieve a balance that isn’t just straight up and down.” An example: Horton’s celebrated laterals, which she defines as “a strange balance when you’re standing on one leg and your entire body in relationship to that leg is parallel to the floor.”

Just as Ailey became the principal channel for Horton’s technique and creative philosophy in the East, Lewitzky became inseparable from his legacy in the West--and, indeed, adapted and extended his movement style to express a radically different artistic vision. Where he prized storytelling, for example, she emphasized abstraction (a legacy from her painter father), and she had no use for the show business forms that Horton enjoyed and profited from. Moreover, her company didn’t merely flourish away from New York, it flourished without reference to New York--as if the powerful management and critical establishments in Manhattan never existed.

The offshoot of Horton technique that Lewitzky developed emphasized spirals and flow more than sharp-edged angularity and exploited a powerful center as much as balancing limbs. Placed at the service of her dance-for-dance’s-sake choreography, it could be weighty or airy, forceful or effortless, but dealt more in formal permutations than theatrical exclamation points.

Ultimately, however, Lewitzky’s greatest contribution may have been sustaining through her early 80s a professional year-round modern dance repertory company against which every other Southern California ensemble found itself measured. Disbanded a year ago, that company left a void that has made performances by Strickler, Livingston, Mizerany and other former Lewitzky dancers seem very special: displays of state-of-the-art technical refinement and freedom nurtured over many years.

Now 54, Strickler joined Lewitzky’s company in 1968 and became a formalist in her image when he moved on to co-found his own locally based modern dance company and, 20 years ago, the Jazz Tap Ensemble. Recognized as one of the innovators who moved tap away from nightclubs and Broadway shows into a new kind of spotlight, Strickler now most frequently appears on local stages with the Rhapsody in Taps company.

Technically dazzling but sometimes coldly cerebral, his tap choreography may be the purest statement yet of Lewitzkyian abstraction and he continues to describe himself as “a modern dancer who taps.”

“I took from Bella her precision of motion,” he says, “the specificity she worked for--the idea that there’s an exact place and time and duration for each action.” His connection with Horton, however, may be more tenuous, though both enjoyed success when giving vernacular forms a high-art make-over.

Livingston, too, has grown in a new direction since her years with Lewitzky (1972-1983). Like a child who feels closer to her grandparents than to her mother and father, she has recently re-explored some prime Horton preoccupations that Lewitzky bypassed--Latino identity, for example--subordinating her gift for lyricism to the demands of character-driven dance drama.

Moreover at 48 she continues to be the most protean of Hortonites, changing nearly everything about her personal image and choreographic style whenever she seems in danger of becoming predictable in any way.

“One of the main things that I inherited is the philosophy of having creativity as the core of one’s work,” she says. “It sounds obvious but it isn’t--other people have other agendas. Marketability for instance. But I feel very fortunate to have modeled for me in Bella and in Lester forms of exploration that are valuable to oneself.”

The newest sprig on the Horton family tree, the 35-year-old Mizerany has been a member of the Livingston company since 1989 and also danced for Lewitzky during her company’s final season a year ago. His own choreography sometimes looks so cerebral, a la Strickler, that it seems to be in a complex private code. But he’s also a chameleon, a la Livingston, a dance-maker who can grow flamboyantly communicative when dealing with one of Horton’s favorite subjects: sexual politics. And like everyone in the family, he dances in a distinctive personal style--in his case startlingly pliant, effortlessly forceful and with a unique animal alertness.

Mizerany sees himself as closely linked to Livingston in dancing style, process of exploration and what he calls “dance ethics, being true to an idea.” But he says his most recent work represents a departure--”There’s some dance steps but a lot of it is made up of running and intense, acrobatic lifts. In that way it’s different from Loretta’s work because she tries to do organic modern dance movement. I tend to want to go just over the edge, to try something and see if I like it.”

Going over the edge is one of the prime compulsions of contemporary artists, and it’s always tempting to think about them solely in terms of individual vision, expression and risk--the values that modernism exalts above all others. However the Horton dynasty suggests that, even in rootless and endlessly reinvented L.A., a tradition of cyclical multigenerational apprenticeship-and-mastery has yielded continuous innovation and excellence for most of this century.

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“DANCE KALEIDOSCOPE,” Luckman Theater, Cal State L.A. Dates: Friday (California pioneers) and Saturday (new work), 8 p.m. Prices: $12-$18. Phone: (213) 343-6683.

“HORTON AWARDS” Luckman Theater Plaza, Cal State L.A. Date: July 17, 6 p.m.