Remembering Geoffrey Holder, Renaissance Man by Thomas F. DeFrantz

Remembering Geoffrey Holder, Renaissance Man by Thomas F. DeFrantz | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
The term “renaissance man” truly applies to few; Geoffrey Holder (1930-2014), who passed away earlier this week after a long illness, numbers among those.  Holder had extensive success as an actor in films and stage, as a recording celebrity, costume designer, painter, director, dancer, and choreographer.
Born in Trinidad, and educated at Queens Royal College, Holder studied dance and painting alongside his older brother Boscoe, and began performing in Boscoe Holder's Dance Company as a boy.  Holder took over directorship of the company in 1947, and toured Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in revues of his own design, before making his New York debut in the Broadway musical House of Flowers (1954). 
Flowers  was a watershed among the “all-black” Broadway musical craze of the 1950s. The show starred Pearl Bailey and Juanita Hall; it introduced audiences to the prodigious talents of Diahann Carroll, and included in its chorus many future dance luminaries. Alvin Ailey, famed musician Joseph Comadore, famed choreographer Louis Johnson, Dance Theater of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell, influential Katherine Dunham dancers and teachers Glory Van Scott and Walter Nicks, and the exquisite Carmen de Lavallade all appeared in the show at its opening.
Holder and de Lavallade married during the run of that musical, and their partnership lasted sixty years. He became a leading dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet in 1955, noted for his expressive fluidity and his striking, 6 feet 6 inch stature.  He ran his own dance group, Geoffrey Holder and Company, who performed his dances in New York from 1956-60. He appeared in several films, including the James Bond favorite Live and Let Die, and in 1975 directed and designed the Broadway musical The Wiz to great acclaim.   
His choreography drew on Caribbean themes and movement vocabularies.  The abstract ballet Prodigal Prince(1967) explored the life of Haitian artist Hector Hippolyte through a series of dance tableaus combining spiritual dancing, ballet, and modern dance techniques with flamboyantly colored fantasy costuming. 
Dougla Suite (1974), performed by both the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem, staged a stylized wedding ceremony, and offered a synthesis of African and Hindu motifs common to daily life in the Caribbean in its pageantry and processionals.  He also directed, choreographed, and costumed the 1978 Broadway production Timbuktu starring Melba Moore and Eartha Kitt. 
I was lucky enough to meet Holder and de Lavallade several times, and always enjoyed their glamorous, commanding presence together. He created unforgettable ballgowns for de Lavallade that she would wear to New York City galas and opening nights; together they were an unstoppable juggernaut of black romance, mystique, and energetic force.  One of Holder's collaborations with de Lavallade had her dancing his 1972 work The Creation forty years later (2012) check the youtube and check out how exquisitely he clad his primary muse, and how much care they shared in creating unimaginable vistas of black creativity. Holder was an original, and we can learn much about our own capacity to create through our shared reflections on his many achievements. 
Axe to the maestro!
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Thomas F. DeFrantzis Professor of African and African American Studies, Dance, and Theater Studies at Duke University. He is a dancer, a choreographer, and the author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture and the co-editor of Black Performance Theory.