Kennedy Center to honor DeLavallade Tuesday
One of the artists receiving the prestigious Kennedy Center award this year has strong ties to Avoyelles. Her mother was born in Marksville, descended from an old French family.
Carmen DeLavallade’s parents moved from Marksville to New Orleans in the early part of the last century. They then moved to Los Angeles, where she was born on March 6, 1931.
This Tuesday CBS will air the Kennedy Center Honors Awards Program from Washington, D.C., in which DeLavallade will be honored. Among those watching will be cousins and other family still living in Avoyelles Parish. Among her cousins are the late civic leader Eleanor Barton of Marksville and retired Army Gen. Sherian Cadoria.
“I am truly honored to receive the Kennedy Center Honors Award and look forward to attending the ceremony at the Kennedy Center,” DeLavallade said.
The 86-year-old dance legend was raised by her aunt, Adele, who owned one of the first African-American history bookshops on Central Avenue in Los Angeles. DeLavallade’s cousin, Janet Collins, was the first African-American prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera.
Carmen’s family history dates back to the late 1840s and early 1850s. Benjamin Pierre de Lavallade, her direct ancestor, was born about 1816 in Chateau Neuf, Charente, France.
He immigrated to the U.S. and filed for American citizenship in Avoyelles Parish, living in the Cocoville area. The DeLavallade name has since died out, but there are many descendants in the Marksville area through female lines. In an 1992 interview from her New York appartment, DeLavallade told the Journal she spent some time with her grandparents in Marksville as a child.
CAREER
When she was 16, DeLavallade began studying ballet with Melissa Blake. After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, she received a scholarship to study dance with Lester Horton Dance Theater. She joined that troupe in 1949.
In 1954, DeLavallade made her Broadway debut partnered with Alvin Ailey in Truman Capote's musical House of Flowers, which starred Pearl Bailey.
In 1955, she married dancer/actor Geoffrey Holder, whom she had met while working on House of Flowers. The 6 ft.-6-in. Holder was known for his deep voice, hearty laugh and his “Un-Cola” commercial for 7Up in the 1970s and ‘80s, and his face was familiar to Americans in James Bond movies.
They lived in New York City and were married for 59 years until Holder died in October 2014. Their lives were the subject of the 2005 Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob documentary Carmen and Geoffrey. The couple had one son, Léo.
DeLavallade says she never counted the years they were married, but knows why they stayed together for so long.
“He allowed me to be myself,” she says. “He was my champion, he was my biggest fan and I was the same way with him.”
It was with Holder that DeLavallade choreographed her signature solo “Come Sunday,” to a black spiritual sung by Odetta Gordon. The following year, she danced as the prima ballerina in Samson and Delilah, and Aida at the Metropolitan Opera.
She made her television debut in John Butler’s ballet Flight. In 1957 she appeared in the television production of Duke Ellington’s A Drum is a Woman.
She appeared in several off-Broadway productions, including Othello and Death of a Salesman.
An introduction to 20th Century Fox executives by Lena Horne led to more acting roles between 1952 and 1955. She appeared in several films, including Carmen Jones (1954) with Dorothy Dandridge and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) with Harry Belafonte. De Lavallade was a principal guest performer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company on the company's tour of Asia and in some countries the company was billed as de Lavallade-Ailey American Dance Company.
Other performances included dancing with Donald McKayle and appearing in Agnes de Mille's American Ballet Theatre productions of The Four Marys and The Frail Quarry in 1965. She joined the Yale School of Drama as a choreographer and performer-in-residence in 1970. She staged musicals, plays and operas, and eventually became a professor and member of the Yale Repertory Theater. Between 1990 and 1993, DeLavallade returned to the Metropolitan Opera as choreographer for Porgy and Bess and Die Meistersinger.
In 2003, DeLavallade appeared in the rotating cast of the off-Broadway staged reading of Wit & Wisdom. In 2010, she appeared in a one-night-only concert semi-staged reading of Evening Primrose by Stephen Sondheim.
AWARDS
In 2004 de Lavallade received the Black History Month Lifetime Achievement Award and the Rosie Award (named for Rosetta LeNoire and “given to individuals who demonstrate extraordinary accomplishment and dedication in the theatrical arts and to corporations that work to promote opportunity and diversity”). She received the Bessie Award in 2006, and the Capezio Dance Award in 2007, as well as an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Juilliard School in 2008.