announcer: This program has been made possible in part by: ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella Lewitzky: I have never considered my work a job but rather a method whereby I view life.

So that it is, for me, as natural as breathing or living, I guess, is a better description.

And if one handles the art form in that fashion, you'd receive endless gifts.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: In two, double plie.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Parallel feet and hold.

Rotate into the plie.

Okay, and go back.

I don't know why.

Could you feel the corrections as I was making them?

Now it's-- And notice the side of the head.

Now get over here.

Bella: It's a part of the doctrine in modern dance, or was in its early days, that you teach how to improvise.

You teach how to compose.

It is less fruitful to study it from some other source than to have made the discovery oneself.

Because if you make the discovery yourself, the tap roots have gone very deep, and that means many, many branches lead in endless paths of discovery.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: I am what is called a modern dancer.

A term which describes exactly nothing because it only tells you that it is not ballet.

interviewer: Your work really is exquisite and so powerful from such a tiny lady but-- Bella: I never feel tiny.

interviewer: Well, how would you describe your dance?

Bella: Mostly I wouldn't.

I don't describe my work because I really am not able to describe what I do.

It's emotion language, not a word language.

Therefore, you have to hunt for similes if you are using written language.

interviewer: You are considered Los Angeles’s most respected choreographer and dancer.

How did you attain that stature?

Bella: I sometimes think that just persistence is 3/4 of it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Oh, I guess I did have one ambition.

I needed to be a perfect performer.

I didn't want to be the best known performer in the world at all.

But my own personal, deep-seated need was perfection.

That was both my Achilles’s heel and my blessing.

♪♪♪ speaker: One of the biggest names in the world of dance is putting her foot down against censorship.

Bella: I decided that I could not, in good moral conscience, accept the fact that a trampling on the rights of the First Amendment was good or even legal.

speaker: The famed dance company turned down an NEA grant of $72,000.

Bella: I'm literally poised.

My pen is held midair.

I recognize that what I was looking at had nothing to do with obscenity, but it was pure outright censorship.

Bella: Please understand that to risk the loss of those funds was to risk the loss of my life's work.

It is out of respect and love for the arts and the endowment that I chose the action which I take.

♪♪♪ Bella: Early along, somebody told me, "Go see this crazy man."

And the crazy man was Lester Horton.

I went to visit his studio.

There was a huge percussion rack with a young man beating the life out of it.

The sound was reverberating from the walls.

On top of this, Lester was screaming.

I nearly fainted with joy.

And from that moment on, I was Lester's body, his devoted follower.

And my training really occurred with him.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Lester was not a skilled dancer.

So, I was the instrument for him.

And because he was not traditionally trained, he had no inhibitors to invention.

So I was in at the beginning of an aesthetic with Lester.

♪♪♪ Bella: Very often, instruction would be how many ways can you rise from the floor?

We would all get to work on it.

He would be the final artistic selecting voice, but we learned cooperatively.

♪♪♪ Bella: For the earliest part of my career with Lester, it really didn't matter what he did.

It was that I was living in the world of dance and moving as I love to move.

Although, his loving for large numbers of people and pageantry was something I never could quite accept.

My interest in dance was highly individualistic.

It had nothing to do with lots of people doing a single move.

♪♪♪ Bella: My dream had always been, Lester, please no longer mobs and mobs of people.

People who can dance, a smaller company, pay them $5 a week, but pay them something.

In reflection, I think I must have been such an irritant for Lester.

Bella: You'll have to remember that the period in which Lester started Horton Dance Group was heading into a depression.

When we did a performance, we never expected to do more than come out owing very little.

You never came out earning anything.

That was unheard of.

♪♪♪ Bella: We got paid by doing movie work.

We were salaried for the first time through that kind of work, never in the theater.

But at this point, Lester's work does noticeably begin to take a new trend.

He became fascinated with the commercial world.

interviewer: Is there any of your film work that you are particularly proud of that you would look at now?

Bella: Oh lordy, no.

Bella: And then, we got an offer to open the Folies Berger as feature dancers.

I had become very upset because I find out that I really loathed nightclub work.

It was shoddy.

It was menial.

It was demeaning.

And this is the real coup de grace.

This is the demise of the Horton Dance Group.

So at this point, I decide.

I leave.

Lester leaves.

Everybody leaves.

The group folds.

During this period of time, I also met my husband because he became a member of the Horton Dance Group.

Newell liked the athletic part of it better than any other part of it and began to fall out of love with what dance was.

And then Newell found architecture, and he's been there ever since and a critic for me and a balance for me.

I got a letter from Lester.

"How would you like to fulfill our earlier dream, a theater space where we could choreograph?"

We'd always discussed that you could not really develop fully without a repertoire and a house.

I said, "Yes, if we can have trained dancers and not 50, maybe 6 good dancers."

Yes, yes, yes.

I realized that in those earliest days, I was probably setting down a different kind of professionalism for myself.

We opened Dance Theater with our first program shortly thereafter.

Lester had given himself over, with torturous persuasion on my part, to a company that would be a little bit more like a professional company.

♪♪♪ Carmen de Lavallade: I remember sitting on the floor watching her shadow through the curtain.

And you know, it's one of those things that you see this incredible person.

To me, she was like a goddess, you know, and she was my teacher and my mentor.

I mean, my God, Bella could balance on a dime.

The beautiful thing about Lester was everyone was treated differently.

We all had different needs.

It was more of a what somebody could give, not that they had the greatest technique in the world, but there was something in their performance that had life to it.

It was about the story.

But when I think back on it, maybe that's where the friction started.

Bella: Lester was a narrative dance maker.

His theatrical background never totally left him.

And by this time, I was no longer a very innocent 16-year-old, docile, wide-eyed individual.

I'd begun to have ideas.

So inevitably, there was going to be a large problem.

♪♪♪ Bella: Also, my moral standards were extremely different from Lester's.

If one were to look back at his portrayal of women, they were wicked evil or they were victims.

I was a victim in almost every piece that he did.

I was strangled, garroted, strung limb from limb.

I died as many ways as anyone can die in his ballets.

Wonderful training ground, but if I were to look at it philosophically, I would have committed suicide had I believed all this.

So, there came a point at which, when I was teaching, Lester was sitting in the audience.

And after the class, he came up to me and said very quietly, "Bella, why are you not teaching my materials?"

Well, he could have poured an ice bucket on my head.

I was stunned.

I said, "Why on Earth does he ask anything like that?"

And then on reflection, I thought, I guess I'm not.

I had begun unconsciously to teach differently.

So I said, "Lester, I will leave," because by that time, I had become a forceful teacher, a pretty strong dancer, and had just begun to choreograph.

And I did that.

He built a technique on me.

He built 15 ballets on me.

I learned an incredible amount from him.

And after I'd left, he never spoke to me again.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: It took me about two years before I could find out where I wanted to be in dance.

And it was at the exact opposite register of Lester.

It was not a rebellion against him.

It was a return to my very first love for dance, the kind of improvisation I had done as a child, moving for the ecstatic joy of moving.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Then one day, I was in the studio, and a gentleman with a hat on, which was in those days extremely alarming, and could be identified as somebody who was not an artist, handed me a subpoena.

I had paid not a great deal of attention to what was going on involving the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I had absolutely no feeling that I was going to be subpoenaed.

I didn't quite understand all of its ramifications.

I was very ill-prepared.

I was astounded that when I arrived at this hearing, what was an absolute battery of media flashlights went off in every direction.

People crowded the lobby.

I did not know that there was going to be a media circus.

So the questions I don't really remember other than the, you know, "Were you ever?"

"Have you ever been?"

The $60 question.

And I took the Fifth Amendment on that.

And I had no interest in whether I would answer or not.

I was in a state of total outrage.

It wasn't that I felt deeply mortified personally.

It was how can this be happening in our country?

They were there, it was very clear, to instill fear.

There was no pretense made that this was going to be a hearing.

It was an inquisition in its basic attitude, and that's what you felt.

And there, I got my taste of what fascism could be.

Oh, it's an Un-American Activities Committee indeed.

interviewer: And this is when you were summoned, and you made the deathless remark to the committee.

I'm not a singer.

I'm a dancer.

Is that correct?

Bella: That happens to be true, yes.

interviewer: It may be written on your tombstone.

Bella: Well, I can't think of anything else more appropriate.

interviewer: What about that experience?

Were you blacklisted?

Bella: I was blacklisted.

Yes.

It really is frightening when you can realize that your safety and right-to-life can be removed from you.

People were terrified to talk to me.

Casual acquaintances with whom I had worked, say in films, would cross the street to avoid me.

After that, I could not work safely in the industry, motion picture industry, which is how one earned one's living in those days.

The feeling of lack of safety always being present was exhausting.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Larry Attaway: There were many things about the way Bella made work that had a different kind of power to them, knowing what she had gone through, as far as just being able to make art the way you want to make art.

♪♪♪ Walter Kennedy: "Confines" was very confrontational.

The thing that I remember the most was she spoke of this artist, George Tooker.

She said there's this particular paranoid sort of sidelong anxious glance that would happen and kind of inward fear-based postural language.

And that gave us kind of a key into this feeling that you got yourself into in this piece or it didn't work.

It had to be that, that place.

The ideas of fear and anxiety in society and how it can beat you down.

You know, this was a social commentary that Bella revisited throughout her work, that this is a possibility.

This is what can happen, and sometimes, it feels hopeless.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: I got a call from Agnes de Mille.

She was doing "Oklahoma," and she asked if I would be interested in doing it.

And I pointed out to her that I was, at that point, quite publicly blacklisted.

I remember making note that of all the world at this point, Agnes had courage.

She said, "It's all right."

And I came on as her assistant.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: My friendship with Agnes has continued for a long period of time.

I'm always grateful to her for her courage.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: I remember Newell and I in a taxi cab coming home, and I'm looking at this tiny piece of life in my lap and turning to him and going, "What will I do with this?"

You know.

The impact of the responsibility began to occur.

I had never been homebound, and I was definitely homebound.

But the growth period is so fascinating.

I talked to her all the time.

I read to her.

I sang to her.

We had conversations together.

It was a fun period.

When I was confident that she was not going to disappear and that she indeed was healthy and was going to live, I picked up my teaching in the evenings.

I taught Tuesdays and Thursdays for the ten years that Nora was growing.

That kept me as much in touch with my professors as I needed to be at that time.

My first company came from the people that I taught.

They all worked either as teachers or secretaries, and they would come after school to study and then linger on into the wee hours as I started to choreograph with them.

And then I just grew.

♪♪♪ Bella: It is important to know that works do not jump from your head full-blown.

There are progresses.

There are retreats.

There are rejections.

There are affirmations.

And so, after doing the usual wretched imitations of my master, which took me about a year, I discarded them all.

And I turned to motion itself.

And this is a little like rediscovering the wheel.

Other people had done this, but it was my own personal discovery, and from the viewpoint of the content of what I wanted to say, gets itself clarified when you know it's right.

And when you say yes, that's the one.

"Trio" was a non-narrative dance.

It was pure dance and remains in repertory, believe it or not.

I did this "Trio" in memory of a very dear friend named Libby Burke.

When she died, her husband called and said, "We are having a memorial service and I want you to speak."

And I said, "I can't.

I simply cannot speak."

And he said, "Bella, you'll just have to get over this.

That's an indulgence that you are not permitted in an occasion like this."

And in this kindly, scolding fashion, I found that I could find my tongue when the issue was larger than myself.

Bella: Good evening and welcome.

I'm Bella Lewitzky.

Bella: And that was a very important lesson for me, and that's how I became able to advocate the things that I believed in, one of them, my art form, the other, the rights of justice within our society.

Bella: Of all the arts, what is special about dance?

Dance has the human body as its sole instrument.

The artist and the art are one.

Therefore, it celebrates the human being as no other art form can.

Self-identity is natural and unavoidable.

By art, I conclude with Vincent Van Gogh's answer.

As a suffering creature, I cannot do without something greater than I, something that is my life, the power to create.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ Bella: My choreographic interests were deeply affected by my father's work as a painter.

He was not really a competitive person.

He, I think, was afraid of failure.

And I think I learned to share this as a positive, not a pejorative feeling.

It twisted around in my life in an interesting way.

My father didn't really concern himself with exhibiting or even selling his work.

He painted for the pure joy of painting.

♪♪♪ Bella: He came from the Ukraine and was attracted to the idea that there is a better way to live, that people can live together in peace and harmony.

He was one of the earliest members of the Socialist Party here in the United States.

And my parents moved to Llano del Rio, which was a Socialist co-operative colony.

Very American thing that they can isolate themselves, choose to live a life separated from the general, most acceptable form of living a life, and exist.

It was a rather flourishing and quite cultured place to be.

Now, I remember absolutely nothing about it because I left there when I was two years old.

But I think that the realities of my parents's lives remain very close to something very deep within me.

interviewer: Los Angeles, from its earliest days, has been called a cultural wasteland.

How would you respond to that in your knowledge of what was going on?

Bella: I spent a very rich cultural life in this cultural wasteland.

So I find that term rather amusing.

That perception that Los Angeles has no history, I think, is sad because the people who perceive Los Angeles in those terms will never have a grasp of it.

They will have missed so much.

Much of what is written about dance was written in Manhattan, where a major portion of dance did take place, and transportation was not that easily arranged.

So there wasn't an easy traveling back and forth from coast to coast.

So they really didn't know what was happening on the West Coast.

Manhattan conceived of anything west of its own shores as being bankrupt.

Lewis Segal: Bella is important because I don't think there's been any, even now, any contemporary dance company that made an international reputation without reference to the New York dance establishment.

Bella created a company here that everybody saw was a wonderful company, and she didn't kowtow to the East Coast leadership.

And she paid for it.

Bella: The New York critics can damage the career of a company in a very singular way.

If you are not mentioned because you're not on the East Coast, then bookers who come over from the variety of places in the world simply don't know who you are.

They've never heard of you.

So, the cloak of invisibility covers you.

♪♪♪ Bella: I think everyone produces art out of something they wish to say.

And so what difference does it make where you do it?

Being removed from the aggressive competition is, for me, an asset.

The level of competition which exists in New York, I think, develops anxieties and hostility and doesn't interest me really at all.

Bella: Again.

Lift the leg back high enough so that you can break it to come in.

Bella: So, I found that I could do what I believed in and what I saw and what I envisioned.

And some people would like it, and some people wouldn't like it, and that's life.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: If you grow up in a valley surrounded by the Sierras, there is a method of motion that reaches away from one’s center, reflective of that geography.

It's different than when you grow up in what Doris Humphrey called her right angled city.

I love California.

I love its variety of people, its variety of vegetation, it's very high mountains, its nearness to desert, mountain, and sea.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: The Dean of California Institute of the Arts contacted me and did a sell job.

I said, "Can I do what I wish to do?"

They said, "Yes."

And so, I became the founding Dean of the School of Dance at Cal Arts.

♪♪♪ Bella: Everybody there knew that they were involved in a highly experimental program.

♪♪♪ Bella: I felt that if you have before you a company that is a professional company as a model, that is a plus asset.

So, I taught two Technique classes a day, and then my company came into this facility.

And my rehearsal time began with them.

My dancers were able to be sensitive, caring role models.

But it became very frustrating to not be able to fulfill part of my program, which was to bring the company into residency.

But there was no theater.

Here is a performance art school without performance spaces.

And I went, "This is craziness."

So, it was at that point when I said, "Are you going to build a theater?"

"No, we are not."

I said, "Then this is not purposeful for me."

And so, I submitted my resignation at that point.

Sean Greene: I think that Bella became too big for Cal Arts.

She had too much work that we were going too often.

About that time, we just started going to Europe all the time.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Larry: When we were setting up the first European tour, it was a big gamble to get Bella seen in Europe.

We would go from city to city, and we didn't know where we were staying.

And we didn't know what we were doing.

We were in Europe for six weeks, and we had three performances.

But after that first really difficult tour, the company went to Europe a lot.

♪♪♪ speaker: I understand you're leaving for Europe very shortly.

Bella: Right, and we are looking forward to that.

We will be arriving in Paris, and the company loves that city.

They were very receptive to us, in spite of the fact that we were warned they probably would not like American modern dance.

We had a young student audience, and they grew in devotion to the performances we did.

So we are very much overjoyed to be returning there.

Iris Pell: The company was taking off.

We were getting more and more bookings, touring more.

And so, Newell, at that time, did design and build the studio at Bella's house.

Sean: Once we got there, it was so beautiful because it was like, here's our home.

It meant that she could create all day long.

She could experiment, and that fit us perfectly.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: "Kinaesonata" was basically a challenge that I put to myself to see if I could obey the music, stay within the structure and somewhat within the development of the music.

And I found that it was relatively boring if you did it literally.

So what "Kinaesonata" did was prepare me to move to written music in a way I had never done before, to still be able to use the music, which ran along respectfully with choreography.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Larry: I think if you want to look at something that speaks of the Lewitzky Technique, which by the way, she told us never to call it that, but this was it, the embodiment of how she believed a body could move is in this piece.

♪♪♪ Sean: We're running around and getting to jump as high as we can, and it's all off-balance, which is her new discovery.

All of a sudden, the technique is about taking gravity and letting it pull you someplace through space.

And I think that was the beginning of that, and she fell in love with it.

Walter: ”Kinaesonata" displays a certain virtuosity of her technique.

And when it came into being, the company was just getting to that place.

And they were looking marvelous, and she was going to show them off.

Diana MacNeil: Bella's honesty and her ability to actually tell you what she thought about you.

There was no concern for your feelings at certain times because she wanted the job done.

We were dancing "Game Plan."

She shouted out, "You could be replaced!"

And I was like, "Okay, I'll dance better!"

But she meant, like, in "Game Plan," you could be replaced if you didn't know what the rule was.

You could drop down to the floor and say replace, and someone would come replace you.

But when you're dancing away and you're clueless for a second and somebody shouts that at you, you're thinking, oh, is that like my pink slip or?

Bella: It's been my experience in my company, and generally in life, that people are highly individual.

Bella: Insert of the spaces.

Improv two.

Go Sean.

Bella: I want what I call chamber-size company so that the group does not look like cookie cutters.

And so, each dancer can rise also to their highest level of ability.

Bella: The passing of Irish.

The third movement.

Front view.

Cut.

Sean: When I entered the company, she told me that I have interesting feet that I have no idea what to do with and an interesting head, whatever any of that means, and nothing else connected between.

But she said it was obvious that I was willing to work, and she felt I was trainable.

She wanted us to grow.

She wanted to plant us, and let us bloom and become better and greater at what we did.

She tried to give us everything she had.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: When I first got the notion for "Spaces Between," it came to me as a spectator in a theater.

When I noticed that the lights shone miles and miles above a dancer's head, and the dancer was about ant size.

And I thought, why not attempt to move into the area which is never utilized?

♪♪♪ Bella: I learned so much from my husband that I would be hard put to make a list.

How many ways do I owe thee, dear?

interviewer: How lovely.

And your husband is?

Bella: An architect.

And he taught me about his art form, and I taught him about my art form.

And they're both spatial art forms.

Larry: They were such a couple.

Without Newell, the artistic sensibility of Bella, I believe, would have been a totally different thing.

Lewis: The sense of architecture in her work simply--it can't be a coincidence.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: How space was divided by my sets was something that Newell was interested in and has always been very helpful with.

I only use sets which have a function.

And since Newell only believes in architecture as functional, we do come together.

A few lines for me can do more than a realistic set could possibly do.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ reporter: A slinky dinner dress of oriental mood is part of Rudi Gernreich’s line for spring.

Bella: Rudi and I knew one another because he was a member of the Horton Dance Group.

He wanted to be the very best with anything he undertook and knew that he was not going to be the very best dancer and decided that he would be the best fashion designer.

He proved to be exactly that, one of the best in the world.

♪♪♪ Bella: He had come to see "Spaces Between" and was very excited, he said, "Let's do a collaboration."

And I said, "Wonderful."

Larry: "Inscape" was a huge marker moment in the kind of work Bella did.

I mean, no one had ever seen anything like this before.

♪♪♪ Bella: Rudi and I decided that his contribution would be fabric and that mine would be motion.

And so, he did for me what I dubbed a “duotard."

♪♪♪ Bella: We began to explore what the fabric would do, where it would go, what it would achieve.

And the movement was invented around the restriction of the fabric.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Larry: Rudi really took her to places that I'm not sure she'd have gone on her own.

It was a true collaboration, and it was also the first presentation of a major modern company at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

No one thought modern dance would work there.

announcer: The ultimate in modern dance.

See the exciting Bella Lewitzky Dance Company in its long awaited Music Center debut.

From coast to coast and around the world, this dance company has been lavished with praise.

Experience a new dimension of thought and motion with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company.

December 21st at the Music Center.

Larry: That evening, the curtain was late by over half an hour because people were lined up around the block to get in.

We filled the Music Center.

No one would believe this.

It marked a point in time where they could not ignore her as a major artist anymore.

Agnes de Mille: Martha Graham struggled for years before she found what she was after because Martha was after the bones of the world.

I have skipped over Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey, and Jose Limon.

Then, there is Bella Lewitzky, the innovator of the West.

Bella: Agnes had called me when she was doing "Conversations About the Dance," and she was doing a survey of dance.

Therefore, would I do something?

Larry: Bella was 65, 70 something by this time.

She said, "Uh, no."

But Bella did agree to put together some of the Horton floor technique.

Iris: Agnes, I think, admired Bella as a very strong technician.

And I had been with Bella for quite a few years at that point and had a strong foundation in her technique.

So, Bella set these floor exercises on me.

They were many is--was going in and out of the floor.

So, she arranged the floor exercises, and it became a dance, about a five-minute dance.

announcer: And here is Iris Pell to perform her floor exercises.

There will be no sound during the following few minutes.

We do not wish to disturb the visual impact.

Walter: Iris just was extraordinary, and there was no sound.

And you could hear a pin drop during this.

And at the end, she does the T fall, which is where you lie back and then do this very drastic level change where you kind of come down to the floor, and it looks impossible.

And people went, “Ah!” And so did Agnes on mic.

You can hear it.

Agnes: Ah!

Bella: It brought down the house.

Iris was modest, very modest.

Didn't even know that.

She had to be called back out on stage to take a bow again.

Walter: You know, this was really, I believe, the first time that anything of Bella's was televised nationally.

So all of a sudden, this sort of legendary mythic West Coast choreographer/dancer was put forward more on the national stage.

So many more people, I think, saw this and went, "Well, who is that?

Who is this Bella Lewitzky person?"

Bella: I've had a dream for about the past five years of a facility especially designed for dance.

It would be called The Dance Gallery.

It would seat from 800 to 1,000 people, and there would be an institute for dance to service the community and also, a children's school.

Not entirely altruistic, I hope to house the company there.

But on the other hand, I hope also to house most of the Los Angeles companies.

It's probably my most insane, impractical project so far.

See, I feel that dance is in a golden period in the United States.

Names like Baryshnikov, like Tharp, like Cunningham are well-known to a larger group of people.

Yet, dance has no space that it can call its own, no home.

Ken Talley: She wanted to give some cred to dance in this community.

We've got opera.

We've got the Philharmonic.

We've got dramatic arts and center theater groups.

I mean, there's lots of representations of things, but there's very little from the ground up facility dedicated to the art and craft of dance.

Terry Gross: So what are you gonna have for dance that other theaters-- Bella: Sight-lines which are as near perfect as we can make them.

Of course, a resilient floor surface, which is not usable if you have theater.

For a dancer, the body is destroyed if it isn't a resilient flooring.

I see it as something which would be a hands across the coasts from east to west.

This dream suddenly took its first step into reality when Bunker Hill Associates offered us a gift of land in the downtown area.

I cannot tell you how exciting that was.

Lewis: By the time I was reviewing Bella for the Los Angeles Times, she was like the Mother Teresa of Los Angeles dance.

I mean, she was "the figure."

Bella: We are in the very last phase of capital campaign.

We are looking for major donors.

At this point, we have got about 5 1/2 million to go out of a $21 million project.

Barbara Bain: There were a lot of conversations about who might contribute and how and how we should approach them.

We found a wonderful person in West Hollywood who had a restaurant, and he picked up the tab.

And we'd invite people, and they would sit down.

And we’d tell them about the gallery.

So it was very exciting, very creative time.

Larry: We needed people with access to money in Hollywood that we normally didn't have access to.

And in the beginning, it was great.

The fundraising was directed entirely toward the concept.

And Bella was adamant that we were raising this money for the program and not the building.

Although, the building was gonna house the program.

But the important piece was the program.

Bella: Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.

This city has turned supportive of the arts, and I want you really to recognize that.

To all of you there who helped lift me when I needed lifting, my thanks.

But my very, very special thanks and fondness goes now, will always go, to the dancers who give and give and give and gave.

Larry: It was really going to be the place to develop the young choreographers of the future, and it was such a dream.

But the dream went astray when the star power wanted it to be about things other than the concept itself.

And the building had grown, needed to attract moneyed people.

Money people want that which is popular.

The first turning point was having to release artistic control into the hands of the board.

Next, comes the Lewitzky Dance Company is not the resident dance company.

I think they would have preferred a ballet company in residence rather than modern dance and a school which was inclusive of a lot of ballet.

Now, you’ve got a lot of ballet in L.A. You can't get a lot of modern dance.

Little by little, my entire program just disappears.

We wanted a simple, honest working space.

It began to turn into a palace.

We're looking at it and saying, "We don't need this.

It doesn't even advantage us."

It had turned itself around so that it wasn't my investment.

It wasn't my dream.

It wasn't anything that I would recognize as my own any longer.

So, I knew I had to leave, and I did that.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Larry had written this piece.

And the moment I heard it, I went into imagery immediately, which happens in my pieces that are the closest to me.

I said, "Larry, may I choreograph to it?"

And he permitted me to do that.

I choreographed it for my daughter.

Nora and I had a great deal of pleasure in bringing that piece into existence, and she performs it magnificently.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: I think if you're around something, it becomes part of the fabric of how you see, how you think, how you feel.

♪♪♪ Bella: Nora, at about age three, danced as her form of play.

And while she was still that young, on occasion, we'd come to class.

And here would be this toddler with her hand up on the bar doing leg swings.

When she graduated, she did not want to continue on into college, but she did join my company at that point and was absolutely exquisite on stage.

♪♪♪ Bella: Eventually, I think Nora might have had questions like, was this broad enough experience?

She needed to be somewhere else.

And I think she disagreed artistically with certain things that seemed very old-fashioned to her that I did.

So, she moved to New York, and within two weeks, she was in Lar Lubovitch’s company.

So I think something about her worked well, and I always have sought her opinion ever since she was a child through to these years.

I consider Nora one of my very best friends in the whole wide world.

♪♪♪ protestors: Censorship is obscene.

Censorship is obscene.

Censorship is obscene.

Censorship is obscene.

Stop censorship now.

Art is not a crime.

Stop censorship now.

Art is not a crime.

Stop censorship now.

Art is not a crime.

Stop censorship now.

Art is not a crime.

Art expression is all right.

Bella: I cannot consider a civilization to be truly civilized that does not put high on its priority list the arts.

So, I am an advocate of government funding.

It's totally inappropriate to tell us what we could and could not do in the way of art.

Now, a government that is terrified of this, I would say, is in trouble.

Jesse Helms: There's countless homoerotic movies produced with subsidies from the taxpayers of the United States, photographs paid for by the American taxpayers.

All the so-called gay and lesbian film festivals.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: Because we are at the edge of monetary disaster annually, we have received funding from the National Endowment for almost as long as it's been in existence.

So, there was an agreement that we had to sign every year in order to receive our funding.

I'm literally poised.

My pen is held mid-air.

In it was the anti-obscenity oath, and it triggered for me a set of experiences I had had earlier in my life.

I recognized that what I was looking at had nothing to do with obscenity, but it was pure outright censorship.

Bella: I decided that I could not, in good moral conscience, accept the fact that a trampling on the rights of the First Amendment was good or even legal.

We chose-- Bella: I had enough political savvy to know that if I just turned down the grant, it was a totally quiet, secluded activity.

It would have no impact at all.

That was the last thing on Earth that I wanted to have happen because this was a protest that I wanted to make known.

Bella: To risk the loss of those funds was to risk the loss of my life's work.

It is out of respect and love for the arts and the endowment that I chose the action which I take.

Thank you.

Ken Talley: It was hard because initially, there was--I felt angry that she turned it down because we were never consulted.

I don't think any of us disagreed with why she did it.

But I think it came as a big shock.

All of a sudden, it's just like you're not getting paid this week, and then next week, you're not getting paid that week.

Bella: I remember coming into the studio and saying, “I have probably jeopardized part of your career, but I will not accept this money.” Had it been truly democratic, it should have been a decision made by the board and the company.

But there's no way I would have signed it no matter what decision had been made.

Bella: Dear Mr Chairman, members of the subcommittee, the level of creativity that I described was permitted, encouraged, and flourished because there was freedom: freedom of the soul, freedom of the self, and a recognition of the diversity within our field.

Once the language that now exists is permitted to continue, the great fear that I have is how it will spread.

What corner of our freedom will it attack?

What is unleashed will be uncontrollable.

Theodora Mahdinah McKay: Bella stood strong when the National Endowment of the Arts said, "No, you can't do this.

You can't do that."

When Bella says, "You know what?

I don't care.

How dare you stop me from being who I am," that's Bella.

No, you're not gonna control me and what I have to say.

speaker: You're a choreographer Bella: Right.

Mr. Tates: Now that we have the word pornography written into this endowment law, do you worry about pornography?

Bella: I think it is very easy for somebody to misread something which might look pornographic but is not.

In fact, that might be a social statement.

Mr. Tates: Did you ever create any dances that address the subject of love, for example?

Bella: All the time.

All the time.

Mr. Tates: How do you avoid the possible criticism of pornography then?

Bella: I would hate to have to start worrying about it.

♪♪♪ Bella: The vaults just closed.

We couldn't meet their payroll because their support needs are basic things like rent and food.

It worked a tremendous hardship on them.

♪♪♪ Walter: She said that she understood that this could cause some havoc with the company.

We were all kind of scared and shocked, and I think we all understood that it was an important stand she had to make.

Thankfully, a circuit judge voted that this anti-obscenity oath was unconstitutional and was taken away.

But the aftereffects were that it had caused a chilling effect.

That's what they called what the oath did.

That that caused a chilling effect on people, not being able to have freedom of speech.

Ken: I think that was pretty much the beginning of the end of our company.

And you know, that was kind of the price she paid for following her conviction.

Lori McWilliams: People really struggled, and we all got little jobs.

When we came back, I think we lost half the company.

They couldn't afford it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Larry: There was a point in time where I thought, "We need smaller pieces."

So I wrote her a little proposal, and so we started working on those.

And the first of the episodes, as we called them, ended up being the piece, "Recuerdo."

♪♪♪ Walter: It had an old modern dance feel about it, a kind of looking back, in some respects, into some movement style choices that were probably a little bit more from time gone by.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: It's very cinematic in a way.

♪♪♪ Diana: There's a brief quartet where the woman in red interacts with the three women in a sort of leave-taking or self-assertion, kind of, "I'm not you, I'm me" kind of thing.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: I would say that “Recuerdo’s” solo female is very much the same as "Trio Versace’s" solo female.

It's from the same wellspring.

It's from the sorrowing, keening, passion vocabulary.

♪♪♪ Bella: So I obviously don't finish these pieces.

They resurface in different ways, and they're triggered by different things.

♪♪♪ Bella: Larry had just begun to present me with materials for the episodes, which were to be acoustical instruments.

And something in his melodic statement touched a very empathetic chord, a very sympathetic chord with me.

And the idea just sort of grew.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: And then this man comes on.

And the man, for me, this is my interpretation, the man was her lover who had gone many, many years ago all of a sudden reappearing in front of her as he was at that time, and--like dancing with a ghost.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: The ghost throughout the duet becomes tangible, and she starts to believe that he really is back.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Diana: And then, she has to relive losing him and losing the three women and where she is now and come to grips with her own passing.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Walter: It was a very personal statement.

I think that primarily came out of her body.

I wasn't there for all of the choreographic sessions for that.

But that was springing from her, you know.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Terry: You strike me as having a pretty remarkable body, and I was wondering if it's been difficult for you to accept the changes of aging.

Bella: Well, I did dance until I was 62, and I think, honorably.

♪♪♪ Bella: Growing old is not the most wonderful thing that ever happened.

But I've had a rich and satisfying life, and this is another voyage for me.

♪♪♪ Bella: Now, I head into what is a last stage of my life, and it's full of information too.

It's amazing.

Life's interesting for me.

You learn, for instance, not to have the anxieties you had when you were younger.

You can see back, and you can see forward.

And you are in the present.

No young person has this capacity.

It's one of the gifts given to an older person.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bill Clinton: Dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Bella Lewitzky first began creating dance-- Bella: There is such a thing as to live, and that is food, shelter, clothing, and then there is such a thing as why do you live?

And that is art.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bella: What legacy I have left here will die unless you become responsible for keeping it alive in Los Angeles, in the nation, and basically, in the world.

The arts are under threat, as usual, but more so now than ever before.

Please don't let that happen.

Please let your voices be heard, and I will be very grateful to you.

Thank you for coming tonight.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: This program has been made possible in part by: ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪