"The international dance community mourns the death of Master Choreographer Eleo Pomare who passed on Friday, August 8, 2008 after an extended illness. Mr. Pomare was 70 years old. Eleo Pomare, a modern-dance choreographer whose mordant wit filtered through his angry social-protest pieces about the human condition and the plight of blacks in particular, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan. Eleo Pomare in 1978. He and his dancers were among the first to capture onstage the street gait found in black neighborhoods. The cause was cancer, said Glenn Conner, his companion and the executive director of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company. As a dancer, choreographer and activist, Mr. Pomare first stunned audiences in the 1960s with works of great originality and forcefulness. Many were also performed on flatbed trucks in the streets as part of the Harlem Cultural Council’s Dancemobile project. Mr. Pomare was the project’s first artistic director. In “Narcissus Rising,” his 1968 signature solo, he was a biker in a black leather jacket and scanty briefs, moving astride an invisible motorcycle as a hostile power symbol, both sensual and defiant toward the world he stared down. The anger of his characters surfaced in many dances in which his gift for distilling emotion ranged over numerous themes. Leading an interracial company, Mr. Pomare and his dancers were among the first to capture onstage the street gait found in black neighborhoods. Yet if urban America seemed his focus, his enduring masterpiece is arguably “Las Desenamoradas” of 1967, based on Federico García Lorca’s play “The House of Bernarda Alba” and set to a propulsive jazz score by John Coltrane. Although the five sisters and their despotic matriarch onstage were Spanish, Mr. Pomare universalized all into a study of love, hate and sexual yearning. The mother and daughters battled in extreme images of outlandish acrobatic physicality that skirted the comical, but also evoked deep insights into human behavior. The piece was one of three by Mr. Pomare staged for other troupes by the American Dance Festival in its “Black Tradition in American Modern Dance” project to preserve the work of leading black choreographers. “Las Desenamoradas” was performed again in June by the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company at the festival in Durham, N.C. The other Pomare works in the project were “Blues for the Jungle” (1966) and “Missa Luba” (1965), inspired by a Congolese Roman Catholic Mass. In an essay for the festival’s 2001 public television series about black dance, “Free to Dance,” Jacqui Malone described the Pomare choreographic style as “characterized by unexpected shapes that twist, bend, fall and lean in continuous organic movement.” Very much his own man, Mr. Pomare was not interested in the formal experiments of the mostly white dance avant-garde of the 1960s. Yet he differed from older black choreographers whom he admired by transforming the mainstream modern-dance idioms in which he had trained into something more raw and rebellious. In “Homemade Ice Cream” he spoofed Americana myths with bitter but hilarious wit. Mr. Pomare also occasionally choreographed pure-movement pieces, including his 1983 “Back to Bach,” but returned to Expressionist influences he had encountered. The 1987 solo “Phoenix” was, he told Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times, “almost a portrait of the black male’s ability to survive.” He added, “You’re up, then knocked down, then you have to get up again.” Eleo Pomare was born on Oct. 20, 1937, in Santa Marta, Colombia, and lived in Cartagena, Colombia, and Panama before moving to New York with his mother in 1947. Hoping be an actor, he enrolled at the High School of Performing Arts, where he was exposed to modern dancers like Martha Graham and decided to focus on dance. He also studied with black teachers and choreographers outside the school. While still a student, he taught dance at the Boys’ Athletic League and presented his pupils’ performances in schools and churches. By 1958 he directed his own company, but in 1962, shortly after his first major concert, he left for Europe on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. After studying with the German Expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss, he formed another company in Amsterdam. Yet, as he told Ms. Dunning: “I began to feel Europe was taking a lot from me and not giving me what I went there to find. The vitality of the civil-rights movement brought me back.” Mr. Pomare returned to the United States in 1964 and expanded his original company, which toured internationally. He also choreographed for other American and foreign troupes and festivals, and was a founding member of the Association of Black Choreographers. In addition to Mr. Conner, Mr. Pomare is survived by three sisters. Mr. Conner said that the Eleo Pomare Dance Company would continue to perform and preserve Mr. Pomare’s works.
"Mr. Pomare’s choreographic works were a reflection of his international experiences, a broad humanistic perspective, and a commitment to social change. In a review written in The New York Times on August 4, 1991, Jennifer Dunning wrote that Mr. Pomare “carved a niche for himself over his 30 years in modern dance as a choreographer and performer with a singular gift for taut, intensely focused work.”
"In March 1996 Mr. Pomare’s Raft, a work featuring three female figures symbolizing the rape of ’s refugees, was performed at the
Museum of
Modern Art —the first time dance was shown there. Also in the nineties, Mr. Pomare choreographed Post Card From Soweto after a trip to .
"Three of Mr. Pomare’s outstanding works were reconstructed to document them as classics of “The Black Tradition in American Modern Dance,” a project of the American Dance Festival. These pieces are: Las Desenamoradas, a work inspired by Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba; Blues for the Jungle, Mr. Pomare’s classic exploration of the black rebellions in the sixties; and Missa Luba, a dance pageant set to a Congolese version of the Catholic Mass. All three works were performed at the American Dance Festival at
Duke
University —Blues for the Jungle in 1989 and Missa Luba in 1990. Las Desenamoradas was performed in 1988 and most recently in June 2008 when the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performed this powerful work to critical acclaim.
"In addition to maintaining his own company, the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, Mr. Pomare choreographed works for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble, the Maryland Ballet Company, the Cleo Parker-Robinson Dance Company (Denver), the Alpha and Omega Dance Company, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, the Cincinnati Ballet, Philadanco, the National Ballet of Holland, Balletinstituttet (Oslo, Norway), the Australian Contemporary Dance Company, the Ballet Palacio das Artes (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), and the Grace Hsiao Dance Theatre of Taipei, Taiwan.
"Mr. Pomare was invited to
Adelaide ’s Centre for the Performing Arts. There he choreographed a major work entitled A Horse Named Dancer. He returned to in the fall of 1995 as the featured teacher and choreographer at the Mirramu Dance Festival near
Canberra .
"In the fall of 2004 Mr. Pomare was commissioned to create a work honoring ’s national hero, Nylon Cheng, on the Grace Hsiao Dance Theatre. The company then toured presenting the new work as well as other Pomare works. In 2005 Mr. Pomare worked with young dancers at Dance Immersion of Toronto, Canada on a new work about Carribbean immigration to North American cities.
"Mr. Pomare was a frequent lecturer on modern dance, black artists and their artistic heritage, presenting at the
Tisch
School for the Arts (
New York
University ), the
Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture, the
Brooklyn
Museum , the International Conference of Blacks in Dance and at numerous colleges and universities. He was invited to lecture at a symposium sponsored by the French Ministry of Culture in
Paris in 2008. He has also been invited to present and tour two of his solo works, Hex and Roots throughout .
"Mr. Pomare’s life and works have been written about in numerous publications including: Black Dance from 1619 to Today by Lynne Fauley Emery, Caribbean Dance from Abakua to Zouk edited by Susanna Sloat, African-American Concert Dance by John O. Perpener, III, and Masters of Movement: Portraits of America’s Great Choreographers by Rose Eichenbaum. In addition, Mr. Pomare’s artistry was featured on the three-part PBS Dance in documentary film, Free to Dance.
"His numerous awards included the Kennedy Center Masters of African-American Choreography (2005), the James Baldwin Award (2004), the New Voices of Harlem Award for Artistic Achievement (1988), the International Conference of Blacks in Dance Outstanding Achievements in Dance Award (1994), and the Key to the City of Messina, Italy (1986). David Dinkins declared January 7, 1987 “Eleo Pomare Day” for
New York City . In 2007, Mr. Pomare was added to the archives of The History Makers.
"Mr. Pomare was born in , South America on October 20, 1937 and arrived in
New York at the age of 10. After graduating from
New York City ’s High School of the Performing Arts in 1953, he formed his first dance company. A John Hay Whitney Fellowship took him to Europe in 1962 where he studied, danced, choreographed and formed a second company which toured ,
John
F.
Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts,
City
Center , Florence Gould Hall, and the
Joyce
Theater ,
"The Board of Directors of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company requests that donations be made to the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, Inc. at
10011
to support the documentation of the on-going legacy of Mr. Pomare’s artistic achievement."
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Eleo Pomare, Dancer and Rebel, Dies at 70
to support the documentation of the on-going legacy of Mr. Pomare’s artistic achievement."-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Eleo Pomare, Dancer and Rebel, Dies at 70
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