Feature Stories

Interviews with Guest Choreographers

Unlike in years past, the Company only had a brief period of rest this past spring. Following our 2005 Season, rehearsals began in May for our three-week July engagement in the heart of Paris. Over the next two months, Choreographers Christopher Wheeldon and Lar Lubovitch created new works for the Company. A new work by Paul Taylor was also set on our dancers by Patrick Corbin in preparation for the inauguration of Les étés de la danse de Paris. While creating or rehearsing their new works in San Francisco, Backstage caught up with these three artists. The following Q & A with Lar Lubovitch is the second in a series of three articles. Check back in December for an interview Paul Taylor Company’s Patrick Corbin.

Best wishes,
Helgi Tomasson
Artistic Director & Choreographer

Lar Lubovitch on Art and Creativity

Backstage: Let’s talk about who or what has had the most influence on you as a choreographer.

LL: It must have been the first people that I was exposed to, because I came to dance quite late. I was 20 when I started dancing, and the first teachers I had were people at Juilliard—Antony Tudor was a profound influence on me, and José Limón, Martha Graham, Anna Sokolow.

Backstage: Did you take anything specific away from any of them?

LL: No, when you’re with people like that, you’re more of a sponge than a note taker. You’re imbibing and inheriting whatever treasures they’re making available. Well, maybe one specific way would be Tudor’s relationship to music.

Backstage: In what way?

LL: He had a very special relationship to music. He didn’t illustrate the music, which can be trivial—he captured its essence, or the gestalt of it.

Backstage: Your work is so different from Tudor’s and Graham’s. The roots aren’t obvious, except maybe in your use of weight, like Limón. You’ve really developed your own style.

LL: Most choreographers who have separated themselves have developed a language that is their own, a style of movement, of relating to music that is recognizable. I think I had a very early intuitive, evolved idea of dancing before I ever started [formal training]. I danced from the time I was 3 or 4, whenever there was music playing. But I didn’t know there was dance in the world until I went to college.

Backstage: What brought you to Juilliard?

LL: I went to the University of Iowa as an art major, and it was there that I saw my first dance company, the Limón company, and it was instantaneous recognition of what I was meant to do. I immediately auditioned for Juilliard. I’d already been creating—painting and sculpting—and it looked like the same thing to me, just with the element of time added. When I make a dance, I often speak in terms of painting it—that I’m painting space, and all that mellifluous motion and the way things are interconnected is because they’re all involved in the same brush stroke.

Backstage: Did your painting influence your work as a choreographer?

LL: Definitely. I do have a sense of painting space, of painting time.

Backstage: Do you still paint?

LL: Nope. Dropped it the day I started dancing.

Backstage: All that training in spatial awareness and dimension must have helped you.

LL: Yes, it develops the ability to see.

Backstage: What about your ice-skating choreography? Has it influenced your concert dance work?

LL: Yes, definitely. I love choreographing for skaters. I picked up a lot of curvaceous ideas about movement—nearly all ice skating happens in curves, almost never in straight lines. The fluidity of skating influenced me, although I was already working in that way. I think they found me, because my work had a kind of curvaceous fluidity that related to what they did. I worked with a lot of skaters and enhanced that sense of curved time.

Backstage: Do you use any kind of imagery with the dancers, from painting or anything else?

LL: No. It’s all about doing the steps and getting the right step and doing it in relation to the music.

Q & A by Daryl Carr, publications and web editor
Photo Credit: Lar Lubovitch rehearses Elemental Brubeck with Katita Waldo and Garrett Anderson (© Erik Tomasson).