Going Solo with Lar Lubovitch

I never set out particularly to be a creator of solos,” says Lar Lubovitch. “But after 60 years in the dance world and 120 dances, I will have made a number of solos.” On Sunday, September 7, Works & Process hosts Lar Lubovitch: Art of the Solo at Guggenheim New York, where the choreographer will show five examples that span his career: the earliest, “Scriabin Dances” made in 1972 for Martine van Hamel of American Ballet Theatre to music of Alexander Scriabin; the most recent, “Desire” made last year for Adrian Danchig-Waring of New York City Ballet as a video project. Danchig-Waring will perform on Sunday, as will Jacquelin Harris, Ashley Green, and Jesse Obremski of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and Craig D. Black Jr. of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Adrian Danchig-Waring in “Desire” by Lar Lubovitch. Photograph by Tobin Del Cuore

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.

Lar Lubovitch. Photograph courtesy of NYC Dance

Which eventually led to Graham’s “Lamentation.”

Graham was dealing with the emotional condition of human grief and taking poses that in her mind’s eye were an abstract rendition of the sensation of grief. It was very radical—particularly if you think of the way people behaved in the golden age of tightly corseted bodices and ruled manners and etiquette—for suddenly people to be spilling on the stage in these great emotional outpourings. It was quite a sensation. And what happened was that as dance grew, they all performed solos to make a statement about themselves individually, and about their entry level into the modern dance world.

What other examples are there of notable modern dance solos?

Very famously, Paul Taylor did a solo in the late ‘50s in which he sat in a chair and did absolutely nothing. And the review in the New York Times the next day had his name with a blank space under it. Much to my surprise, it was ‘written’ by Louis Horst, who had been Martha Graham’s teacher and mentor, and her musical director.

What purpose does a solo have within the context of a larger work?

In ancient Greek theater, they define two different kinds of solos. They said that a monologue is a solo performed by a single person who gives information to the other actors on stage. A soliloquy, on the other hand, is a solo given by a single performer directed towards the audience in which they divulge personal information. When you see a solo (soliloquy), you really are seeing the removal of what theater likes to call the fourth wall. It becomes a very personal correspondence between the audience and the dancer. That’s instant information to the audience about what’s happening on the stage.

Trisha Brown famously did a solo with her back to the audience. And, you know the idea that solos are meant to be directed towards an audience. But that was such a direct contact with the audience to turn around and show the solo from the back.

Lar Lubovitch's “Concerto Six Twenty-Two.” Photograph by Jack Mitchell

When you’re making a dance are you thinking, what information do I need to convey to the audience with this solo? Or are you thinking more in terms of movement?

Every choreographer has a different motivation and sort of underlying reason for doing what they do. For me, the real reason to make any dance is about dancing itself. I think dance is a very profound subject. But you can’t just make a dance with steps alone. You have to find reasons to put that dance together. When I make a dance, I’m trying to find a way to dance that paints a picture of the music. And it’s the dancing itself that is a profound part of what’s taking place. To me, that’s the message.

I’m struck by the diversity of your music selection for the Works & Process solos: Alexander Scriabin, Meredith Monk, French art songs, Tom Waits, Robert Schumann. You’re working with a broad palette.

Yes, I always have. Something that intuitively grips my imagination is the sound of music. Each of these has a very different physical response, and my interest has always been to find precisely a way to behave that this music is describing. And that’s going to be a different vocabulary, a different way of moving each time.

What does it take for a dancer to be a good soloist?

They have to have the innate ability not to dance to the music, but to be the music. There is a subtle difference there. I think Balanchine has commented on that: To dance to the music is to be one step away from the music. But to embody the music and play the music with your body—that is the step further that grips the imagination. That’s the dancer I want to watch, and that’s the dancer whom I want to choreograph.

Can you talk about your process in working with the five dance artists you’ve selected for Works & Process? Other than Danchig-Waring, they’re all learning solos originally made for other performers.

For a dancer to overtake a solo to make it their own, it doesn’t have to be choreographed on them. But there has to be room in it for them to own it. So my guidelines can’t be so stringent that they’re straight-jacketed. These solos are different on different people even though the steps are essentially the same.

I think people, if they envision a dance rehearsal, picture someone in the front of the room telling a dancer what to do with their arms or how to kick their legs. It’s almost never about that. We discuss how to feel when you do that—what the dance is about, what it’s expressing, how it relates to the music, what energy to use, what dynamic we are dealing with.

If I’ve invited a dancer to do a solo, I’ve already known something about them that, in my mind’s eye, makes them qualified for this particular solo—something they bring into the room. They apply it to this dance that I’ve already pre-envisioned belongs on their body and on their spirit. And so I watch what they do to it. And then I advise.

You’ve had a prodigious career. Doing this for so long, 60 years, how do you maintain your interest level? What motivates you to continue the work?

It’s a little bit of a mystery. I’m 82 now, and my body is pretty well wrecked. I can’t project physically on that level anymore. And I really don’t think I can create dances anymore because of my particular way of making a dance, which very much involved my own body. I still care about it a great deal. Seeing a great dancer dance has the same effect on me today that it did when I discovered dance. It’s something I love to watch, I love to see, it’s thrilling to me. Painters’ paintings last forever. Musical composers’ works go down on paper. What a choreographer has done, video is no remedy for that. When the choreographer’s done, they never get to see again unless it’s being danced, and I like to see my work. I like to see what I’ve done. And so if companies ask me to set a dance, I’m eager to do it because I get to see my work again.

Karen Hildebrand

Karen Hildebrand is former editorial director for Dance Magazine and served as editor in chief for Dance Teacher for a decade. An advocate for dance education, she was honored with the Dance Teacher Award in 2020. She follows in the tradition of dance writers who are also poets (Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson), with poetry published in many literary journals and in her book, Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.

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