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BIOGRAPHY
Lar Lubovitch
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Lubovitch continued to choreograph for his company and others in the 1990s, with notable commissions from the Paris Opera Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In 1993 he joined the creative team revamping the classic 1948 movie THE RED SHOES for the stage. While the show was a flop (folding after 51 previews and five performances), critics lauded Lubovitch's choreography for the culminating ballet. Vincent Canby wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES, "With astonishing grace and wit, the ballet dramatized just about all that needs to be said about the sometimes obsessive nature of artists and the bargains they make with life."
For the next several years Lubovitch's energies were increasingly tapped for the commercial theater and ice dancing ventures. In 1994 he choreographed a new version of "Oklahoma!" for the London stage. In 1996 he choreographed two new dances and oversaw the recreation of Jerome Robbins' original choreography for the Broadway revival of "The King and I."
He'd begun working on the ice in 1984 with JOHN CURRY: DANCE ON ICE and continued that interest with a full-length "Sleeping Beauty" on ice for television in 1987. In 1994 he choreographed Gustav Holst's "The Planets" for a television production featuring French skaters Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay that was nominated for an International Emmy Award and a Grammy Award.
Not until 1997 did he again focus his attention completely on the concert stage, this time for a joint commission by American Ballet Theatre and the San Francisco Ballet for his first full-evening ballet, a dance version of "Othello." Lubovitch commissioned an original score from Elliot Goldenthal, best known for film scores. ABT premiered "Othello" in May of 1997. The press, as usual, was divided on the New York premiere, with Kisselgoff declaring it a success and Joan Acocella, in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, exclaiming "What a dud!"
In a 1997 article for the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Ellen Pall observed that stylistically Lubovitch's choreography falls outside the prominent movements in late 20th-century modern dance:
While many of his colleagues soberly explore social ills or, fascinated by formal concerns, coolly toy with the limits of dance itself, much of his work is lushly romantic, passionate, tender, full of dazzling, ribbonlike curves, eye-confounding lifts and spins. ... In a time when beauty is deeply suspect in all the arts, Lubovitch's work is frankly, shamelessly beautiful.
List of Works
Further Readings
Source: INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY OF MODERN DANCE. St. James Press, 1998. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.
Top banner photos: Desmond Richardson as Othello; the leads Desmond Richardson and Yuan Yuan Tan, who dances the role of Desdemona. |
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Iago (Parrish Maynard) sows the seed of jealousy in the mind of Othello (Desmond Richardson). |
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Katita Waldo as Emilia, Desdemona's lady-in-waiting and Iago's wife. |
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