MALE BONDING Lubovitch dancers perform 2007's Little Rhapsodies.

Photograph: Nan Meville

Longevity in dance is hard-won, and it’s not often that a choreographer can chalk up 40 years of activity. Beginning Wednesday 5 at City Center, Lar Lubovitch, 65, celebrates a momentous anniversary in two programs featuring his newest dance, Jangle, as well as a couple of vintage gems: 1978’s North Star and 1969’s Whirligogs. Both will showcase dancers from Juilliard, Lubovitch’s alma mater, where his teachers included Martha Graham, Antony Tudor and José Limón. Lubovitch, whose choreographic career has taken him to Broadway, professional figure skating and Hollywood (he appeared in Robert Altman’s The Company), took a break from touring to talk about his rich history.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been expanded with online bonus content/]

Do you remember the first dance you made?
The first dance I seriously intended was an audition piece I made for Juilliard. I choreographed a solo before I had anything to do with dance or choreography. I discovered dance all at once and did a little investigating about what I should do about it, and somehow or other I was told I should audition for Juilliard. I was at the University of Iowa when I choreographed that solo, and a friend working in the film and television department had filmed it as a project. A few years ago, a dancer in my company went there to teach and brought it back.

How did you feel when you watched it?
I felt very uplifted. I recognized that whatever I had done intuitively in that solo was still a part of my operating procedure—that I hadn’t lost touch with some instinctive origin of my sense of movement or time or whatever it was that went into making a dance.

What was that origin?
I was improvising at a very early age, not knowing what I was doing or thinking that I was doing anything other than just sort of responding in an unthinking way. And that particular response before thinking has a great deal to do with the search for one’s own voice, which is the most essential undertaking of being a choreographer. So I had a voice at a very early age, which was a natural, intuitive, instinctual response to moving to music. The effort to retain that voice, or to rediscover and speak in that voice in spite of the obstacles, has been the bottom line of the definition of integrity in trying to be a creator.

What do you mean when you refer to “obstacles”?
As one goes through this process, there’s a great deal of resistance. Whether it’s critical resistance by people who write or from those who are responsible for the funding of dance, many people have their own agenda and understanding of whatever it is that they define as right or beautiful. There are many people who attempt to create art in an effort to gain the approval of all of these varying parties. And, as the old saying goes, you cannot be all things to all people. The effort to be that only gets you further and further away from the origin of your own gift.

Has your idea of beauty changed in your choreography?
I’ve carried with me, for many years, a quote of Picasso’s that I found in a newspaper article. I actually had it laminated decades ago and it’s still in my wallet. In it, he said that he tried to portray the world as he saw it, and in a way that seemed most truthful to him and, therefore, most beautiful. That resonated for me: that having some sense of authenticity in one’s output is the definition of beauty. The key line is, “In my own way, I have always said what I considered most true, most just and best, and therefore most beautiful.”

You were a gymnast in high school. Why did you start studying gymnastics?
I had been a very physical kid and not athletic at all—I couldn’t play sports—but physically inclined. Jumping, running, leaping: all things physical. And dancing, of course, but dancing as a private undertaking and gymnastics was something that seemed to draw me.

How did you hear of Juilliard?
I was an art major at the University of Iowa. Two things happened simultaneously. I was working as a novice gymnast and a woman came to watch our workouts; she said she was a choreographer and that she was looking for some “men to lift some women around.” For one reason or another, it intrigued me. The word dance had a draw for me, and she introduced me to the idea of dance. And then, shortly thereafter, the José Limón Company visited the campus. I thought dance was just something that I did privately! So that, at once, appeared to be the things that I did best and loved most put together: art and gymastics. I inquired immediately as to where this was happening, and it was actually a member of the Limón Company who told me that I could try out dancing at the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College, and someone there told me about Juilliard. I found out that José Limón and Martha Graham, who were teaching classes at the summer session, also taught at Juilliard, and that’s where I could go to continue toward an academic degree and become a dancer. I was very fortunate to have begun dance at that particular point in history. Those people were all teaching at Juilliard and they were the very heart and soul of dance as we knew it at that time. My first teachers were José Limón and Martha Graham. Antony Tudor. A very young Alvin Ailey. Anna Sokolow was my choreography teacher.

Did you have a sense of how important they were?
None at all. I had no idea. As is the case of most people of that age, I was very self-possessed and the experience was being translated through a very uninformed young person’s frame of reference. I really didn’t understand the depth of my surroundings. I didn’t understand it intellectually; I understood it on visceral level, though. I certainly knew I was part of something that was life altering.

Were you aiming to be a dancer?
I immediately set out to become a choreographer and I thought I should spend a few years learning about dance in order to do that. For me, becoming a dancer was a vehicle toward becoming a choreographer.

How important was learning history to you?
Very important. I think that’s probably one of the things that I see most lacking in the world of dance today, and that is a problem for dance as a form. Dance tends to forget its own history; young people who dance and choreograph do their work not knowing fully what’s preceded them, so they’re frequently reinventing the wheel with great excitement and unfolding it into the world and are very grand about their great pronouncements and discoveries. I love to see new work—it means everything to me—but so often the real moves forward in dance are at such small increments. Dance spends a great deal of time moving sideways and often even backward. Because of the nature of dance, its history is so difficult to retain and understand for people who have not been in dance for long. It’s the nature of what dance is. It’s frustrating in a sense; there is always a tremendous, very poignant beauty to new work, whether it’s rediscovering the wheel or truly making a new discovery. The heart and soul of what goes into it is so moving and poignant, and I’m always looking to the youngest, newest, most offbeat work to remind me that discovery is still possible.

What do you want to show about your life’s work in the City Center program?
I don’t know that I took that point of view. I’ve made a lot of dances in 40 years. As with many choreographers, I’m most interested in my newest work. I’m always hoping that the next one will get it right. Through the years, there have been very few that I personally feel have had value, or have stood some sense of time, or resonate for some reason or another. And it’s a personal judgment, but there are very few dances that I care about in that way. I’ve tried to put together programs of dances that were watershed moments in my own evolvement.

Talk about the new work, Jangle.
It’s to Bartok, and it’s subtitled “Four Hungarian Dances.” It is about a way of dancing, described by Bartok’s music, and it’s very Slavic; he often quotes folk tunes and gypsy melodies. Bartok’s music reaches a very wide range but there’s an area of it that’s very evocative of Slavic folk dance, and more than anything that’s really what this dance seeks to do: to paint an image of Bartok’s Slavic dance-inspired music. What the costume designer and I discussed was having these people look like they were walking down a street in Budapest in about 1936, and that there were street musicians on a corner, and that they spontaneously danced as a crowd gathered and were drawn into a unplanned street party.

Why are you working with an odd number of dancers?
Frequently, when I set out to make a dance, I try to work in a number that I haven’t worked in; the results of working with seven are very different than with eight or nine. It presents a problem of geometry and balance and architecture, and there are a number of equations that seven presents to me that have to be resolved, and through the course of the dance there is, what is to my mind, an equation that amounts to a kind of architecture and time that eventually has to resolve. The number seven is a challenging number to resolve over time.

What was your frame of mind when you made Whirligogs?
I had really just begun to present choreography. My first concert was in October of 1968. I wasn’t really thinking that a company was what I was engaged in, but there was no place to dance and I had a number of friends like myself, loosely looking for a way to do something. All I really wanted to do was to try making dances, but it did attract a great deal of attention, and very shortly thereafter, we were touring. The very first commission I ever got was from the Bat-Dor Dance Company in Israel. The dance itself was suggested to me by a Paul Taylor piece, [1956’s] 3 Epitaphs. For some reason, it struck a very strong chord in my imagination; at my first concert, I made a dance that featured one of the characters from 3 Epitaphs. And when I was asked to do this piece in Israel, I decided I wanted to go further with that character, and I did this dance Whirligogs. Honestly, I was never driven too much by conscious thinking at that time. I was very much just doing whatever entered my mind. It was not an intellectual process. I was very free and unfettered by ambition. So I saw nothing right, wrong, innovative or not innovative in taking a character from 3 Epitaphs and featuring it in a dance. [Laughs] Whirligogs was, in a way, an effort to create a sequel to 3 Epitaphs—starring the same characters, but advancing the story.

Have you ever talked to Paul Taylor about it?
No! I never even told him, and I subsequently became quite good friends with him.

What was it about that dance that caught your imagination?
I think that the unusual blend of terror and comedy that is so much a part of Paul Taylor’s work struck me very strongly. I don’t know that I had seen something that put those two things together—funny and horror—and I found the dance scary in a way, the way clowns and puppets can be scary. I don’t think I had known that particular quality before.

NEXT: more with Lar Lubovitch»