One Step Removed

The stage of the Luckman Theatre was awash in both flowers and tears as the curtain came down on the Lewitzky Dance Company’s final performance, May 17, 1997. At 81, Bella Lewitzky, choreographer, teacher, arts activist and founder of a modern dance company that cut a broad artistic swath in Los Angeles for 31 years, was calling it quits.

After the speeches and accolades had been delivered, and the troupe had flexed its muscles one last time, Lewitzky closed up shop and headed for retirement in the New Mexico desert. For the 10 core Lewitzky dancers, however, reality would be considerably different.

Lewitzky dancer John Pennington remembers the night: “When I looked around and saw how many lives Bella had touched, that was very impressive. The dancers, the support team, her friends--you realize the scope of one’s life. But most importantly, it was my family, and [it] would be greatly missed.”

The dissolution of the Lewitzky company had been two years coming. On the brink of turning 80, Lewitzky had felt that too much of her energy was spent keeping the organization going instead of making art. The company, formed in 1966, renowned for flowing, abstract works, had enjoyed rave reviews in 20 countries on five continents. Culling from a 31-work repertory, the final two seasons saw concerts in dozens of American cities, from Seattle to Nashville.

With Lewtizky’s retirement, the Los Angeles dance landscape was forever altered. There are other local modern dance companies: Diavolo, Helios, Lula Washington Dance Theatre, and Loretta Livingston and Dancers to name a few. But the dynamics would not be the same: Aside from the Lula Washington troupe, which has created a niche in the African American community, these companies lack the institutional weight and impact of the Lewitzky organization. Most have only minimal performing seasons, and none has the national-international presence or touring schedules that Lewitzky’s long history and success allowed for.

But if the L.A. scene lost an icon and an anchor, the dancers lost something more personal--a salaried livelihood with benefits, an intense focus and a particular kind of community. What would they do for an encore?

For the most part, one way or another, they would all keep dancing.

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Fourteen-year Lewitzky veteran Pennington who toured domestically and internationally as a soloist with the company, wasn’t surprised when he heard that the troupe would be disbanded. “I knew she was thinking about it, after 30 years,” he says. “We were given two years’ notice, so we had time to adjust.”

Pennington, now 39 and one of the few artists given approval to pass on Lewitzky’s technique, first eased into teaching and was hired part time by Loyola Marymount University and Pomona College in the fall of 1997. “Still,” Pennington recalls, “the question for me was: ‘How do I keep a professional status in dance?’ ”

A visceral performer known for spectacular feats of balance, Pennington had had a 46-week contract with Lewitzky, virtually unheard of during the ‘80s and ‘90s, even for many New York company dancers. Besides the financial security, the dancer felt, after nearly a decade and a half, that he had reached a certain level of mastery.

“If Bella hadn’t retired, of course, I would still be dancing with her,” says Pennington, who was nominated for a Lester Horton Award in solo performance in 1997. “I feel I was just arriving at my peak--the combination of physical as well as artistic abilities. When I joined the company, I was 23; I wasn’t a mature artist at all.”

Propitiously, Bonnie Oda Homsey, co-founder with Janet Eilber of American Repertory Dance Company, “bumped into” Pennington at Conjunctive Points Dance Studio shortly after Lewitzky’s closing concert. An admirer of his work, Homsey invited Pennington to perform as a guest artist with American Repertory Dance Company, which was founded in 1994 and is dedicated to the reconstruction and preservation of America’s modern dance legacy. In March 1998, Pennington joined the troupe; he is its first male dancer. (The company performs next weekend at the Getty Center.)

Says Homsey: “John is not only a phenomenal technician, but I felt that he would be a wonderful addition, because he would be able to slide in and out of different choreographers and styles.”

Pennington is pleased that the company’s mission helps him further the Lewitzky legacy. He recently performed her 1972 solo “Ceremony for Three: Sage and Warrior,” at a Getty Center concert, and her “Agitime: ‘The Achiever,’ ” at 2100 Square Feet. Last year’s annual Los Angeles revue, Dance Kaleidoscope, saw Pennington perform in Lewitzky’s reconstruction of Lester Horton’s “The Beloved.”

Pennington’s life has unequivocally changed:

“I have to buy my own health insurance,” he notes with laugh, “and the structure of my daily life is different. I don’t go to the studio, take class and rehearse all day with the same people. [But] I teach now, which I love, because I like giving back what I’ve learned.”

And he’s thrilled to still be performing: “That,” he says, “is where I live.”

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Like Pennington, Walter Kennedy, who danced with Lewitzky from 1978 until 1997, turned his immediate attention to academia after the company disbanded. He had already been thinking along those lines, having earned a bachelor’s degree in dance from Cal State Long Beach in 1996.

Realizing, at age 40, that joining another company as a dancer would be difficult, Kennedy serendipitously happened upon his next move: While performing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, one of the stops on the Lewitzky farewell tour, a department head remembered seeing a piece Kennedy had created at Cal State called “Fault Boundaries.”

Recalls Kennedy: “We talked about the possibility of graduate school. It [had been] on my list of places to check out, so I went there in the fall of ’97 and was made a visiting lecturer while studying for my master’s degree.”

Kennedy will complete his degree in May, but the uprooting has proved difficult for the Sacramento-born dancer. “I am a Westerner,” Kennedy, now 42, says. “My heart and soul are in California. If you put it in dance terms, it’s a different sensibility about time and space and motion. People move with more expansiveness in Los Angeles.”

If Lewitzky hadn’t retired, Kennedy, a principal dancer who also became the troupe’s rehearsal director in 1990, agrees with Pennington that he would still happily be part of the organization. “Artistically, Bella molded me. There wasn’t a day working with her that I wasn’t challenged. But,” he adds, “the time the company was ending was actually good for me. It was time to stretch my own vision.”

Kennedy confesses he’s got a “great gig--with health benefits,” and has been invited to teach full time at Illinois next year. “I enjoy [it],” he says, “because the more professionals that work in the academic world, the standard goes up.”

He also continues to create dances: Last summer, he was invited to be a guest choreographer at the Yard on Martha’s Vineyard, where his new work “Gathering” premiered.

Says Kennedy: “My fantasy would be to have one foot in the professional world--to choreograph on professional dancers--and also be able to work in academia. I don’t know if I’m a choreographer that would have his own company,” he says, “but to re-create the [Lewitzky] experience, and to let another generation of dancers enjoy what I got to enjoy, that would be amazing.”

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English-born Yolande Yorke-Edgell, who danced with London’s Rambert Dance Company before joining Lewitzky in 1994, did decide to form her own company. Upon hearing of Lewitzky’s plans to retire and disband the company--a shock, she says--Yorke-Edgell began work on the Yorke Dance Project.

“I thought about going to New York, but I [felt] like I was laying down foundations here. I realized I would have to do something,” the dancer says, “and that something was founding my own troupe.”

With eight members, the company still has no formal board or fund-raising arm. “It’s not full-time; we only get together when I’m choreographing something,” Yorke-Edgell says.

The going, not surprisingly, has been tough, with only a handful of company performances to date--notably appearances last year on two multi-company bills at Occidental College, where nearly full houses, and The Times, responded favorably.

“It’s a huge undertaking,” maintains Yorke-Edgell, who performs as well as choreographs for the company. “It’s not the putting together [of a program] so much, but the gathering of funds to support a company and all it entails. For that reason, we only have one performance [scheduled] for the end of this year or the beginning of 2000.”

As a relative newcomer to the Lewitzky company, where seniority determined wages, Yorke-Edgell had already been juggling part-time massage work to help finance her dance career. She’s added teaching to her list of occupations; she sometimes dances as a guest artist (most recently with Hybrid Physical Dance Theater at the Fountain Theatre); and she has broken into commercial work, choreographing television spots for Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Hotel and Sony cameras.

With her own troupe barely in the chrysalis stage, Yorke-Edgell says what she misses most from her Lewitzky years is “the information Bella imparted and the actual performing.” She talks to her mentor every few months, she says, “mostly about teaching and problem solving.”

The challenges of helming her own company sometimes seem overwhelming.

“[Before] I didn’t have to worry about this other stuff. It’s hard being a director, producer, choreographer and dancer. It’s my first attempt at doing anything like that, but I am learning a lot.”

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For the rest of the “family” with Lewitzky at the end, the story has also been mostly about change.

Only one, however, has given up dance altogether: Melody McKenney, who signed on to Lewitzky just for the final two seasons, currently does massage therapy in San Mateo. “I enjoyed dancing professionally,” says McKenney, now 25, “but I don’t miss the touring, living in hotel rooms and being on a plane every few days. I also had a neck injury and felt I needed time to let my body rest.”

Four of the dancers have left town to pursue their craft. Darren Wright, who was still a high school student when he joined Lewitzky in the last six months of the final year, has followed Kennedy to the University of Illinois to get a dance degree.

Both Michael Mizerany and Adrienne Clancy, who joined Lewitzky just in its last two years, have found slots with other companies. Mizerany, 35, who has had solo successes in L.A. and danced with the Loretta Livingston troupe, is now working with Malashock Dance and Company, in San Diego, although he keeps one foot (and an apartment) in L.A. Clancy, 29, who “didn’t know where” she’d go after Lewitzky’s final performance, wound up in Washington, D.C., with Liz Lerman’s 20-year-old company.

Clancy explains the appeal of joining the company, even though it was a short-time proposition. In a way, she explains, it was a “high point” for the company. “I felt I could take Bella’s power, learn the lessons and carry them with me,” she says. Clancy now has a 52-week contract with Lerman--”even better than with Bella,” she says with a laugh.

Heather Harrington, nearing 30 and another Lewitzky short-timer, also relocated--back to New York, her hometown. She is doing some choreography, but she has left dance farther behind than most of the others. A former figure skater, Harrington is coaching ice dancing for Ice Theater of New York and Chelsea Piers. “The transition was hard,” she says, “because I felt like I had it easy in L.A. All I had to be concerned with was dance. Coming back to New York, I had to be concerned with making a living.”

The last two Lewitzky dancers, Karen Woo and Lori McWilliams--matched motherhood with the company’s demise.

“It was good timing for me,” says McWilliams, 41, who had been in the company for 12 years and now teaches tap and jazz to children in Agoura. She could hear her biological clock ticking. “The baby was dated to the day of our last performance, the last day of the company. It was like--boom.

“I miss the performing, the traveling and the kind of friendship with people who know where you’re coming from, but I was kind of done anyway.”

Woo, now 39, started with the company in 1993. Since the company folded she has finished her master’s degree in dance as well as having her first child. Living in Orange County, Woo echoes McWilliams’ words: “I knew I was going to have a family, and after the company disbanded it was a good time.” But Woo plans to return to performing, and recently she ventured East to dance in a work choreographed by her former colleague Clancy in a Washington, D.C., concert.

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And what has become of Lewitzky herself? With her husband of more than 50 years, architect Newell Reynolds, she moved to Albuquerque, planning to spend more time with their daughter and two grandchildren--and to relax.

But like many refugees from Los Angeles, they discovered they missed the city more than they thought. They are returning to L.A. this summer, to a condominium they’ve purchased in Silver Lake.

“It’s full circle,” Lewitzky said recently by phone. “Los Angeles is where we grew up. That’s where we did all our work and we still feel it’s our home. In New Mexico I had time to take stock of where I was, what I was doing [and] what I would like to do. I was delighted to be able to do that.”

She has recently had an artery replaced in her leg, and although the “healing has been slow,” she says she feels very good. In May, she will receive the Capezio Dance Award, for lifetime achievement, in New York City.

She had an inkling of the direction her dancers might take after the company closed. “We were friends as well as teacher and pupil. I sort of knew what they were interested in and where they might go.”

The only surprise, she says, is that any of them in these trying times is working at putting together a company of their own.

Lewitzky expresses no regrets about closing down her company.

“I like where I’ve been and where I’m going,” she says. “There’s not too many people who can say that.”