Dancer, choreographer, company director, educator, curator, coach, Lubovitch has worn all the hats, and at 82 he’s not stopping any time soon. “I have a pretty big year coming up,” he says with characteristic understatement. ABT plans to revive the three-act “Othello” that Lubovitch made for them in 1997, and he’ll also set work on the Vienna State Opera Ballet, Ballet Arizona, Ballet Houston, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company. Oh, and he’ll teach during fall semester of University of California, Irvine, where he has been on faculty for nine years. “I feel very lucky and privileged to still be invited. I am doing some big things this year that I really don’t know how I can do. I think I probably also said that when I was 20 and deciding to be a dancer. I don’t know how I can possibly do it, but I just jumped in and did it, so—you find a way.”

Fjord Review spoke with Lubovitch via Zoom about his interest in the solo format and what we can expect from the Works & Process presentation. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What it is about the solo that appeals to you as a topic to discuss for Works & Process? 

It used to be almost a rite of passage for young choreographers to do solo concerts. And in the time that modern dance began with Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham—they performed solos almost entirely. The solo became a kind of required element to earn your bona fides in avant-garde dance. I think Martha Graham’s “Lamentations” is the apotheosis of the modern dance solo. 

One of the points I’m making in the program is to draw a line between the origins of modern dance, the path that was set in action that we are still walking. We are still assessing this original idea of creating physical embodiment of emotional conditions in relationship to music. This is what they did at the beginning. It opened a Pandora’s box, really, that became what we now know as contemporary dance. Once opened, all of dance changed. And the way it changed is still in effect today. Otherwise we’d still be doing dances about peasants and birds and things, but we’re not. We’re doing dances—oh, God, so many dances—and so many reasons for them to exist. But the human condition is almost always at the heart of it.

What is it that opened what you’re calling Pandora’s box?

In the mid-1800s a French opera singer-musician in the Paris Opera named Francois Delsarte was frustrated with what he had to do as an actor-performer with wildly gesticulating arms and strange moves that were very stylized that he thought had nothing to do with the emotional context of the music or the dramatic subject he was performing. He developed a whole school of acting to train people to understand what their body needed to do when they were expressing specific emotions. One of the leading exponents of the Delsarte System of Expression was an actress named Genevieve Stebbins, one of the most lauded of the Gilded Age performing artists. She started lecturing on this system of expression, and it caught fire. 

At the end of Stebbins’ lecture, she would do a performance of what she called statue poses. Each pose depicted a particular emotional condition. She’d unite them with very simple transitional material and it became a kind of a long movement episode. She was famous for it. She would get standing ovations. Well, who was looking at these in New York at that time? Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, their students, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey. Isadora Duncan had already been exposed to it in California. They began doing solos based on these ideas that the physical body could take on the shape of emotional conditions, and it changed the look of dance forever.