Turnabout for a Muse

Carmen de Lavallade looks like somebody’s muse: tall and beautiful, with wide dark eyes open to the world, hair cascading over her shoulders or twisted, in conversation, around an inquisitive finger, radiating an ageless youthfulness. A commanding presence sitting in the library at the Alvin Ailey studios, she is also completely without affectation--modest, even, about her many accomplishments as a dancer, actress, teacher and choreographer.

Then she begins to reminisce about her professional encounters with Martha Graham, Josephine Baker and Alvin Ailey, and from the chronology alone, although nothing in her manner or movement indicates it, it’s apparent that she actually is 69 years old.

“Dance for me,” Alvin Ailey wrote, “would have been impossible without Carmen de Lavallade.”

“Ailey’s muse” is one sobriquet that’s accompanied De Lavallade throughout her illustrious career. It was seeing her in a solo performance in their high school gym in Los Angeles, so one version of the story goes, that inspired Ailey to become a dancer. He followed her to the class and company of choreographer Lester Horton, where Ailey himself began to choreograph after Horton’s death.

Later, De Lavallade and Ailey got the call to come to New York to dance in the Broadway show “House of Flowers”; toured the Far East with the De Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company; and, eventually, spun off on their own individual tangents.

She remained an inspiration to Ailey throughout his life, and he choreographed six pieces for her. Now, she’s choreographed something for his company: “Sweet Bitter Love,” was unveiled in New York in December, and is featured in two of six Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion starting Wednesday.

“People always ask me, ‘What was it like working with Alvin?’ Well, I don’t know,” says De Lavallade, with the tone of affectionate exasperation one might use in discussing a younger brother. “Alvin was my buddy. We all grew up together. [I’d] known him since junior high school. No big mystery there for me. All I knew, I saw him in a gym class, and I said, ‘You ought to be dancing!’ So I dragged him to a dance class, and that was the end of that. He always blamed me for that: ‘It’s all your fault.’ ”

De Lavallade is not one for pretense. The facts speak for themselves. Never a permanent member of the Ailey company, she danced, instead, as a guest with some of the preeminent institutions and choreographers of the period: Antony Tudor, John Butler and Agnes de Mille; at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, and at the Metropolitan Opera (where she followed her cousin, Janet Collins, in breaking the color barrier, in advance of Marian Anderson).

Today, she can reminisce about Lynn Fontanne, who showed her her own special exercises for maintaining a beautiful neck; Josephine Baker (“She used to push me forward and say, ‘You don’t bow long enough’ ”); or her relationship with Martha Graham.

“I was not Graham material,” she says. “I’d go to class and I was miserable; my body just couldn’t do that kind of movement, but we would talk. She used to come see my things; I would go see her things. I really learned a lot from her. She was an extraordinary woman.

“I’ve had a gift, with those people,” she adds. “I came at a good time. The ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s--boy, things were jumping.”

Another choreographer-actor she met in that period was Geoffrey Holder. They met in the “House of Flowers” production and married in 1955. Recognizable to a wide audience for roles in the Bond movie “Live and Let Die” and a series of 7Up commercials, among other film and TV credits, he also won two Tonys (for direction and costume design) for “The Wiz.” Holder is, in De Lavallade’s words, “my best fan. He’s the one who keeps me on course. He’s always bawling me out for getting discouraged.”

De Lavallade began her formal dance training at 14, in the heart of Los Angeles (“I am an L.A. person,” she says), and continued to study both classical and modern dance with Horton and Uruguayan-born Carmelita Maracci. Horton was “totally contemporary, with his own technique,” she says. “And Lester sent me to Carmelita. He said, ‘She can give you what I can’t.’ They were rather similar, very strict--well, Lester was a little looser,” she emends, laughing. “because he was constantly experimenting with the body and seeing how many different ways you can bend it. Carmelita was more the ballet--Cechetti-style, not the English or Russian style, which suited me just perfectly. Pointe work didn’t agree with me, but the style was perfect for me, and I loved it. So I had the best of the best, in contemporary and the ballet.”

Another major influence on De Lavallade’s dance and choreography came at a much later stage of her career. In the early 1970s, she worked for almost a decade at the Yale Repertory Theater.

“It was rather a fluke,” she says. “It was all a transition period.” De Lavallade had done two television productions with actors who became friends. One was Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale” with Alvin Epstein (“Brock Peters was the narrator, Jerry Orbach was the Devil. I was the Princess,” she says with a princess-y toss of her head). The other was a John Butler ballet based on a poem by Francois Villon, created for De Lavallade and the actress Mildred Dunnock. (“It’s the lament of an old woman. She’s talking about her age, and I was her as a young person.”) It was through Epstein and Dunnock, who also worked at Yale Rep, that De Lavallade made her first connections there. The theater’s head, Robert Brustein, later offered her a job teaching movement to his aspiring actors.

Her students at Yale included Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver; but she also used the opportunity to learn herself. As she choreographed and worked on productions--”We were going seven days a week, practically”--she was also soaking up lessons about acting.

“You had all those different directors coming in and playwrights. It was a chance to watch Terrence McNally and James Coco and all those incredible people. I’d just sit there and listen. And if there was a part that I could understudy, I did, so I could make some kind of transition.”

The transition led to significant roles, such as Titania in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in the 1970s. Acting has continued as a sideline ever since. In addition to stage work, De Lavallade has taken on small film roles, including cameos in John Sayles’ “Lone Star” and the recent comedy “Big Daddy,” with Adam Sandler.

Her Yale period, she says, also “changed my eyes for dance. Because the way the actors worked, the way they dug out information about their plays, made me go back and look at dance the same way. Instead of just pasting on steps, you find a reason for the steps. I want the technique; but I want the technique to say something. I don’t want it to be about a leg, or a hand out here, or a foot. It’s a matter of storytelling. My whole rehearsal [for ‘Sweet Bitter Love’] was about the story, and the movement came out of the story. Once you find what you want to say, the movement sort of takes care of itself.”

And “Sweet Bitter Love” is a story, first and foremost. “It’s just plain old-fashioned narrative,” says De Lavallade of the piece, which is about the end of a relationship. “It’s really taken from a solo that I did, to Roberta Flack’s ‘Sweet Bitter Love,’ ” she says. “When the Ailey company asked me to do something, I think it was my husband who suggested, ‘Why don’t you add on to that?’ I thought, well, it might be interesting to add the other side of the story, put the man in.”

It was also Holder who pointed her in the direction of Donny Hathaway’s music. “Donny and Roberta sang together a lot,” she says. “Their voices are so exquisite, especially when they have very little orchestral background. They’re like arias, they’re not like songs. You don’t hear beats and things like that. I used one of his songs and two of hers.”

“I had in mind ‘Brief Encounter,’ the English film,” she adds. “Those were nice people. I said, I don’t want any jerks. I don’t want any jerky guy, any whiny lady. I want really nice people who really love each other and have to break it up. And therein lies the tragedy.”

The piece got rave reviews when it opened in New York this winter. “They don’t make love duets like this anymore,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times. “Or rather, it takes a dancer, actor and choreographer of Carmen de Lavallade’s gifts and experience to create a bare-bones image onstage and fill it with unabashed emotion.”

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Unfortunately, De Lavallade won’t be able to see the Los Angeles performances. She’s coaching the Canadian Alberta Ballet in a revival of Butler’s “Carmina Burana.” Her schedule in the last few years has been as full and varied as ever: choreographing at the Metropolitan Opera; taking a narrator’s role in the world premiere of a rediscovered Mozart opera fragment in Boston; writing a jazz musical, still in progress; and giving dance performances of her own. She and two other older dancers, Gus Solomon and Dudley Williams, have formed a trio called Paradigm.

“I call us the Becketts of the dance,” she says, laughing. “We do these strange, kind of wonderful things; we remind me of [Samuel] Beckett in a way: They make sense and they don’t make sense. We make a wonderful trio, I must say.”

In December, she and Solomon danced in a program by Dwight Rhoden’s company, Complexions.

“We did one of our pieces, and a young man came up to me, and he said, ‘I like that piece, it’s cool.’ And I told Gus, ‘We have arrived.’ When young people go up to you and say the piece is cool, something’s happening. And it has nothing to do with age. Having experience is not being old. You’re certainly not kicking your legs up like you used to, but there must be something going on when people in their teens and 20s find something in it.”

Getting up to leave the Ailey studios, she pauses to express her wistful excitement about the Ailey troupe’s Los Angeles performance.

“I have not performed in L.A. since I left, in the 1950s,” she says. “It seems so strange. But now they’ll have my ballet.”

And, she adds, “hopefully, I might get there with a performance of some kind, this year or next year.”

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“Sweet Bitter Love” and other works, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Wednesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. $15-$45. (213) 365-3500.