Carmen de Lavallade, a dancer who defied boundaries of race and age and touched almost every realm of the performing arts in a career of over six decades, died on Monday in Englewood, N.J. She was 94.
Her death, in a hospital after a short illness, was confirmed by her son, Léo Holder.
Long and willowy in flowing jersey skirts and with elegantly slicked-back hair — Duke Ellington once called her “one of the most ravishing women in the world”— Ms. de Lavallade continued to dance through her 80s.
She worked in theater, opera, nightclubs, film and television alongside 20th-century luminaries like Alvin Ailey, Lena Horne, Agnes de Mille, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker and her husband of 59 years, the actor and dancer Geoffrey Holder.
Ms. de Lavallade began her career in Los Angeles, where she studied with Carmelita Maracci and the modern dance pioneer Lester Horton and performed with Mr. Horton’s company, one of the first multiracial troupes in the country.
She came up in an era when Black artists faced enormous challenges and when Black and white artists were not always allowed to dance with each other onstage or onscreen. At one point she was barred from appearing with a white partner on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Yet she flourished. She went on to perform with many companies, including American Ballet Theater, and choreographed for or appeared with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem and the Metropolitan Opera, among others. She was a muse for choreographers like Mr. Ailey, Ms. de Mille, John Butler and Glen Tetley.
“I never planned, doors opened,” she said in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2014. “Most people in my career stay with one company, but I never did that. I met extraordinary people that gave me something to look forward to. I, unbeknown to myself, became fearless about going into territory I knew nothing about.”
She also appeared in films and spent 10 years at the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theater, where she served as a performer, choreographer and adjunct professor, teaching many actors, including a young Meryl Streep.
Carmen Paula de Lavallade was born on March 6, 1931, in Los Angeles. Her family had moved to California from New Orleans in the 1920s. Her father, Leo, was a bricklayer and postal worker; her mother, Grace Grenot de Lavallade, died when Carmen was in her teens.
Ms. de Lavallade later said she found early comfort in the diversity of Los Angeles. “You became involved with all kinds of people,” she said in an interview with the Kennedy Center. “It was wonderful, East L.A., at that time.”
Her early exposure to dance came through her cousin, Janet Collins, the first Black ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera, who became her mentor. Ms. Collins faced racism: She had to study separately from white dancers, and when she auditioned for Léonide Massine’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, she was told she would have to lighten her skin by powdering it in order to perform. She refused and later went on to join the Met.
“I remember as a child, I just imagined myself dancing like Janet,” Ms. de Lavallade said. “She became my idol.”
Despite the challenges Ms. Collins faced, Ms. Lavallade decided to pursue dance. She would take three buses to get to her first dance classes in Hollywood. At 16, she received a scholarship to study with Mr. Horton, who had a school and theater on Melrose Avenue.
“He was a real master,” she said. “He gave you courage.”
“In Los Angeles during the conservative McCarthy period,” she added, “we were artists of all races dancing together.”
Later, she and her husband were active in the civil rights movement. “It was in our work that we stood up for what we thought,” she told the Yale Alumni Magazine. “We did our revolution with our work.”
At Mr. Horton’s school, she soaked up his multidisciplinary approach, taking classes in ballet, modern and African dance forms, as well as acting, music and painting.
“We were responsible for coming in early, ironing our costumes, taking part in the making of the costumes,” she later recalled. “We knew about the lights, we knew about the set, everything about the theater, and after performances we had to help clean up. So we learned to appreciate it.”
“I still iron my own costumes, I still like to do something of my own,” she added. “It was more than a school. It was a theater. The people that came out of it, we were always very creative people. We weren’t just in a room with a barre and a mirror.”
Ms. de Lavallade also brought along to dance class a young friend from Thomas Jefferson High School named Alvin Ailey, and their friendship and creative partnership would be lasting.
“We were dynamite together,” she said.
The broader dance world took notice when she appeared in Mr. Horton’s ballet “Salome” in 1950, replacing Bella Lewitzky. Lena Horne helped introduce Ms. de Lavallade to Hollywood, and she appeared in several movies, including “Carmen Jones” (1954). The choreographer on that film, Herbert Ross, invited her to appear as a dancer in the Broadway production of “House of Flowers,” a musical he was choreographing that opened in 1954.
Another member of the cast was Mr. Holder. They married in 1955; Mr. Holder died in 2014. Ms. de Lavallade is survived by their son and her older sister, Yvonne de Lavallade Davis.
With Mr. Holder, Ms. de Lavallade expanded her repertory of dance styles. Together they choreographed what would become one of her signature solos, the West Indian-influenced “Come Sunday,” set to Black spirituals sung by Odetta.
In 1957, she appeared in the television production of Duke Ellington’s “A Drum Is a Woman.” She also acted in Off Broadway productions. In 1970, she came to Yale’s drama school and staged musicals, plays and operas.
But her dancing is what many of her colleagues and students remembered.
“That body is so amazing, it can do anything,” Judith Jamison, one of her mentors and the former artistic director of the Ailey company, told The Washington Post in 2017, ahead of that year’s Kennedy Center Honors, at which Ms. de Lavallade was recognized. (She declined to attend a related White House reception because of her opposition to the Trump administration.)
“It’s not about technical prowess,” Ms. Jamison added. “She takes your breath away by achieving it so easily. Her hand moving onstage is enough to take your breath away, just a flick of the wrist, or moving it slowly.”
Ms. de Lavallade continued to perform long past the time at which most dancers retire. She was 88 at her last performance. She reflected on how age affects a dancer’s body in her autobiographical piece, “As I Remember It.”
“You lose something and you gain something,” she said. “You learn that the body is changing and you have to accept, ‘OK, I’m 83.’ At this age it’s an experience.”
She added, “I think, How far can I go?”
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