To my surprise, there’s been no mention of the passing of
dancer Carmen de Lavallade in my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Carmen
died, in the waning days of 2025, in a New Jersey hospital, and east coast news
outlets paid her glowing tributes. But I’m still shocked that her death, at age
94, was apparently ignored in L.A. After all, Carmen was born in Los Angeles,
and—as a teenager—began her serious dance training after winning a scholarship
to Lester Horton’s landmark Dance Theater in West Hollywood. Quickly becoming a
star of the Horton troupe, she took on such fiercely dramatic roles as Salomé,
while also teaching small kids like me the basics of modern dance. Me at age 4, with my beloved teacher
Still in her early twenties, Carmen set out for the Big
Apple, along with her close friend, future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Both soon
found work in a 1954 Broadway production of House of Flowers, a fanciful
Haiti-set musical that was an unlikely collaboration between Truman Capote and
Harold Arlen. It was there that Carmen met and married Trinidad-born
Geoffrey Holder, who later triumphed on Broadway with The Wiz: he would
win Tonys both for directing the show and for contributing its lively costume
design.
Now based in New York, Carmen continued on as a dancer, featured
in Ailey’s American Dance Theater productions and guesting with other
companies. Eventually she began teaching stage movement at the celebrated Yale
School of Drama, where a young Meryl Streep was one of her students. When Carmen
and I met for lunch in New York ten years ago (see photo above from that memorable afternoon) she reminisced about appearing
in the premiere production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs,
imaginatively staged in the Yale swimming pool.
Blessed with a beautiful face and a long slim body, Carmen was
undeniably well-suited to movies too. This began back in her Lester Horton
days, when she was cast in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones,
the Broadway hit that adapted Bizet’s Carmen to an African-American
cast. If you watch one of the big
musical numbers, set in a local bar during World War II, you’ll see a young Carmen, her long
pony-tail swinging as she dances exuberantly to “Beat Out the Rhythm of the
Drum.” In 1959, she revealed her acting
chops in a tense scene from a crime drama, Odds Against Tomorrow, wherein
she played the tough-minded girlfriend of star Harry Belafonte. Almost forty
years later, she was featured in John Sayles’ Texas drama, Lone Star.
In the course of a long career, Carmen received many
accolades, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2017. But I can’t help
remembering a story my parents told me when I was a kid. In the 1950s, Carmem
was appearing with two male dancers as an opening act for Pearl Bailey at the
Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and my folks drove from L.A. to see her perform.
Carmen’s name blazed forth on the marquee, and she danced nightly in an opulent
show room for appreciative crowds. But Carmen was not allowed to lodge at the
Flamingo. Her café au lait coloring meant she was stuck all day in a
stuffy motel room, without access to the swimming pool and other amenities that
made the Flamingo a world-class resort. So my parents gave up fun in the sun to
spend their weekend keeping her company. When they got home, they told me all
about it. It made no sense to me then . . .
and it still doesn’t. But I learned once more that the world outside of
Lester Horton’s Dance Theater was not always a graceful place.
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