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Modern Romantic by Ellen Pall from The New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1997, Sunday Lar Lubovitch lies sprawled on the floor of a large rehearsal hall at the headquarters of American Ballet Theater in downtown Manhattan. His eyes are bloodshot, cheeks pale, chest heaving, T-shirt dark with sweat.
He gets himself back to his feet. Compact, trim, earthbound, at 54, Lubovitch is still handsome, even boyish at times. His companions stand, too: Rebecca Rigert, Scott Rink and Ginger Thatcher, all longtime friends and sometime members of his own modern dance company. Next week, the A.B.T. dancers will return and choreography of ''Othello'' will officially begin; for now, these three stand in for them, allowing Lubovitch to sketch out in advance a solo and some of the complex corps work that will begin Act I. They range themselves across the floor as he presses the ''play'' button on a boombox. The creation of ''Othello'' is a rare event, not only for Lubovitch personally but for the dance world in general. Though long story-ballets are more popular with American audiences than short, abstract dances, only a handful of evening-length narrative ballets have been made here in the last 30 years. In part, this is because abstraction has dominated the attention of choreographers. It is also because the expense of creating such works is staggering: production costs aside, rehearsal time at A.B.T. runs $200,000 a week. Warm, delicate music fills the studio -- a rolling, generous harp accompanied by a piping oboe. Lubovitch listens, absolutely still. Freshly composed by Elliot Goldenthal, this is Cassio's first-act solo, which Lubovitch envisions as a kind of ''toast'' offered by the newly promoted lieutenant at a wedding celebration for his commander, Othello. Lubovitch considers even his abstract works narrative in the sense that they explore subjects like grief or friendship through the interactions of nameless characters. though more explicitly narrative, his ''Othello'' will not act out the play using pantomime but rather seek to embody its characters, themes and emotions in pure dance. Ann Hould-Ward's costumes combine period and modern elements. And the choreography will blend ballet and modern dance, with the principal women en pointe but working within Lubovitch's signature style. Finally, arms gently swinging, Lubovitch takes a small hop left, then right. Behind him, the three dancers hop left, then right. (All three dance, as each may make a different contribution.) He shuts off the tape, repeats the hops, broadens them into a series of lively, youthful sidelong leaps. Then, ''What'd I do?'' he asks, turning. The dancers repeat the sequence. ''Too busy,'' he decides, restarting the music. He listens again, tries moving backward, then once more stops still. He looks completely blank, like a man who has just come into a room to get something but suddenly can't remember what. When he choreographs, Lubovitch looks for ''the next inevitable step,'' the movement that flows naturally through the body from the previous one. After a long pause, he starts forward with a series of swift, springy steps. He asks the others to repeat the sequence, then copies it himself, refines, adds more. Back and forth, he and the dancers trade sequences, editing, extending, building the solo. Half an hour in, Lubovitch takes off his glasses and briefly buries his eyes in his sleeve. Fifty-four is old for dancing. Moreover, a series of surgeries on a bad knee -- a souvenir of his own career as a dancer -- have left his skeleton realigned, his muscles out of shape. It is two years since he made his last concert dance, ''So in Love,'' a suite of five Cole Porter songs choreographed with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. Since then, he has done the musical staging for the current Broadway revival of ''The King and I,'' adding two short dances, and (though he does not skate) has created several ice dances for champion skaters. Gamely, sometimes grimly, he plugs away at the solo, adding a jut of the hips, a strange waggling of the head, an energetic double twirl. At last, consulting his watch, he asks the others to perform what now exists of the section. ''Something like that,'' he says dubiously, then collapses again on the floor. It is 1 o'clock, the end of the session, the end of the year and for now the end of what he can do to prepare for the coming challenge. Starting Jan. 7, he will have 53 days with the A.B.T. dancers to make 90 minutes of ballet. New Year's Day or not, if he could get someone to unlock the door, he would surely be back in here tomorrow. Lar lubovitch occupies a curious position on the contemporary dance spectrum. While many of his colleagues soberly explore social ills or, fascinated by formal concerns, coolly toy with the limits of dance itself, much of his work is lushly romantic, passionate, tender, full of dazzling, ribbonlike curves, eye-confounding lifts and spins, swirling ensembles that part, regather and part again. In a time when beauty is deeply suspect in all the arts, Lubovitch's work is frankly, shamelessly beautiful. In a ''backhanded way,'' he observes with some amusement, this has made him a radical. ''It is radical today to talk about beauty and truth,'' he says one afternoon over lunch at his Chelsea apartment. ''People come down hard on you for subscribing to romanticism, passion, sentimentality, guilelessness -- to representations of beauty in a traditional sense.'' For a man whose work is noted for its fluidity and rhapsodic ardor, Lubovitch is an uneasy presence -- polite, articulate, not unfriendly, but distinctly guarded. His living room is spare, with bleached wood floors and a scattering of uninviting chairs. He discusses his personal life with reluctance, stiffening even when asked how many siblings he has (three), and describes his work with a hesitant precision that almost suggests a cultured nonnative English speaker. In a sense, he is a nonnative speaker: his first language is movement, gesture, body, dance. Yet Lubovitch came to dance rather late. His father, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, helped run a family-owned clothing store on the near north side of Chicago; his mother occasionally lent a hand. At 7, Lubovitch rounded up some neighborhood kids and made up a dance for them to put on in a friend's basement. But though he jitterbugged at parties and improvised at home for fun, art was his serious pursuit. He was an art major at the University of Iowa with an interest in gymnastics when, one day in 1960, the Jose Limon Dance Company visited the campus. It was the first professional dance performance he had ever seen, and at once, he says: ''I saw what I was meant to do, what was inevitable in my life. I knew it immediately.'' He promptly left Iowa, won a scholarship to Juilliard and studied ballet and modern dance there with, among others, Limon himself. He also took classes at the Martha Graham School and the Joffrey Ballet's school, working nights as a go-go dancer to make ends meet. Despite his late start, he was only 20 when he began to perform with several dance companies. But he had always had it in mind to choreograph, and in 1968 he formed his own company. Rising through the 1970's along with such troupes as Twyla Tharp's and Meredith Monk's, it soon came to be known for the excellence of its performers and the intelligence and muscular lyricism of its choreography. Mark Morris danced with the troupe in the late 1970's. He describes Lubovitch as a ''smart, passionate'' man who creates ''all-out'' dancing. ''Lar doesn't make up dances in his head,'' he says. ''They happen on dancers, and that's great. Dancers love to watch his work, because it looks like it would feel fabulous to do.'' Audiences and critics have also enthusiastically embraced Lubovitch, though he has not become as widely known as Morris or Tharp. The tender pas de deux for two men in his 1986 ''Concerto Six Twenty-two'' became a kind of visual anthem of the movement to combat AIDS and is performed regularly at benefits. He has had considerable success on Broadway, starting in 1987 with the musical staging for Stephen Sondheim's ''Into the Woods'' and including a 20-minute ballet created for the 1993 flop ''The Red Shoes.'' (his contribution was the show's only triumph.) Anna Kisselgoff of the Times is among the critics who have frequently praised the power, inventiveness and musicality of his work. But others have been less friendly, complaining that his work is overwrought and saccharine -- pretty sound and picturesque fury signifying not much of anything. Lubovitch freely admits that he is no intellectual. He sees no particular harm in sentiment. Though his knowledge of music is sophisticated and extensive, he cannot read it. A group of Christmas carolers can bring tears to his eyes. In short, he is a romantic, and not afraid to say so. ''Irony is so highly touted, the utmost in intellectual rigor,'' he says. ''And irony is quite amusing -- I enjoy it. But I think it is a product of cynicism, and cynicism is a defense. I deal explicitly with affairs of the heart -- sincere, very human feelings that we needn't be embarrassed about. And they are just as valuable as subjects of theater.'' On a cold night late in December, Lubovitch sits in a corner of the small, dimly lighted music studio in Elliot Goldenthal's Manhattan apartment. The meeting is one of a series that will continue through the making of ''Othello.'' Goldenthal, 43, is dark and good-looking, with a nervous, slightly wolfish grin. Brooklyn-bred, with a thick veneer of theatrical charm, he seems at first an unlikely collaborator for a man who cries at carols. But the partnership has gone well. Goldenthal, classically trained and well-read to the point of erudition, is best known for his stage and film scores (''Juan Darien,'' ''Interview with the Vampire''). His most substantial concert work to date is the huge, powerful ''Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio,'' which had its premiere last year. Lubovitch had never met him, but drawn by the ''passion'' of his work, he invited him to write the score for ''Othello.'' Goldenthal composes mostly in his head but records what he writes with a synthesizer, allowing him to present Lubovitch with tapes of what sounds like orchestrated music. Since November, the two have been meeting weekly to go over new material; then Goldenthal trims or expands it according to their discussions. Tonight Othello and Desdemona's first pas de deux is ready. ''Tender, fragile, mystical, shimmering, worshipful, celestial,'' Lubovitch has stipulated in an 11-page synopsis of the ballet, written at Goldenthal's request. The music starts. Lubovitch listens, torso still, feet wiggling inside his shoes. Goldenthal ''conducts,'' his hands swooping through the air in graceful arcs, his head moving as if sound were palpable, something you could rub your cheek against. The pas de deux begins with the slow rise and fall of notes that will be Othello and Desdemona's motif. Stated first on oboe, it is luminous and sweet, only gradually changing to hint at the catastrophe to come. As the section continues, the theme passes to low strings, swelling slowly to a deep, gravely beautiful resonance. The music rises again, becomes brittle, then disintegrates at last as a piccolo cheeps above a shimmer of violins. ''Whew! That's wonderful,'' Lubovitch says. He chose strong collaborators -- Goldenthal, the set designer George Tsypin and the lighting designer Pat Collins -- and is flexible about altering his ideas to accommodate theirs. They are flexible in turn. When Lubovitch said he wanted the second act to begin in complete darkness, with even the reading lights in the orchestra's pit shut off, Goldenthal cleverly devised an opening based on scales, something the musicians could literally play with their eyes closed. When the choreographer later decided the darkness idea was not so hot after all, Goldenthal never complained. He listens willingly to Lubovitch's occasional musical suggestions, while Lubovitch sometimes knits Goldenthal's visual images into the dance. Now Goldenthal plays the music again, this time narrating each event, explaining his choice of instruments and the way the sounds connect to the scene he saw in his head. As it ends, ''I wanted it all to rise into ethereality,'' he says, ''as if they stayed awake all night and the piccolo -- the birds----.'' He falters, his own dark, complex face briefly, surprisingly, suffused with new love. ''As if it's too much to take in all at once.'' ''Othello'' began as a gnawing desire to create a full-length narrative dance, Lubovitch says, a desire that crystallized in 1995, after he made a short dance for A.B.T. and found himself ''hungry to go to the next step'' with the company. A.B.T.'s artistic director, Kevin McKenzie, was similarly disposed, hoping that Lubovitch might prove to be the ''next Kenneth MacMillan,'' the Scottish choreographer who created several ballets for A.B.T. and whose versions of ''Romeo and Juliet'' and ''The Sleeping Beauty,'' among others, the company regularly performs. The idea of doing ''Othello'' occurred to Lubovitch almost at once. '' 'Othello' can be told in pictures, in bold strokes,'' he says, ''which is the way dance works. I wouldn't believe I could make a dance out of 'Hamlet.' But everyone understands jealousy.'' Other choreographers have been drawn to the play, but the dance that Lubovitch's ''Othello'' will inevitably be compared with is ''The Moor's Pavane,'' Jose Limon's courtly, celebrated one-act distillation. As it happens, ''The Moor's Pavane'' was one of the three dances Lubovitch saw Limon perform that crucial night in Iowa. But though he gratefully acknowledges Limon's influence on his work, he sees neither homage nor Oedipal challenge in his choice of libretto. Yet, ''You watch,'' he says, laughing, ''some critic is going to write, 'Lubovitch couldn't do in an hour and a half what Limon did in 20 minutes.' '' A.B.T. is hoping otherwise. It has a lot riding on ''Othello.'' A few years ago, the company found itself $5.5 million in debt, a result of poor management and a harsh fund-raising climate, and almost folded. Since then, with a new executive director, Michael Kaiser, the debt has been cut almost in half. But the company is still in the red, and it is investing more than a million dollars in ''Othello.'' Another $300,000 is being kicked in by a co-producer, the San Francisco Ballet, which will perform the piece's West Coast debut next spring, and an additional $75,000 or more will be contributed by Lubovitch's own company. A.B.T.'s hope is that the project's very size and riskiness will draw new audiences, inspire donors and revitalize the company. Lubovitch, at the center of all that expectation, is under enormous pressure. But he is bearing up nicely. In a studio at A.B.T. on the wet first day of March, he presents an informal run-through of Acts I and II of ''Othello'' to a handful of guests, including -- for the first time -- San Francisco Ballet's artistic director, Helgi Tomasson. The fast dancing of a second-act tarantella has left Lubovitch with a torn ligament in one hip and an inflamed bursa in a shoulder. but his knee, iced nightly, is behaving well. On the whole, he looks more fit and cheerful now than he did two months ago. And the run-through goes smoothly. The opening-night Othello, Desmond Richardson, is home with a nasty stomach flu. So the part is danced by Keith Roberts, an astonishingly gifted soloist. His Desdemona is Julie Kent, one of A.B.T.'s most valued principals. (Richardson will be paired with Sandra Brown as Desdemona.) In the first duet, Roberts lifts Kent so high that her hand almost hits a fluorescent fixture. Still under revision, the pas de deux is serenely beautiful, with steps that deftly draw out subtle substructures in the music; at the cheeping of the dawn birds, Kent descends from Roberts's shoulder as if walking slowly down a long spiral of air. As Iago's plan unfolds in the second act, the dance grows more violent, the tarantella fiercer and more exhausting. Lubovitch paces the huffing corps like a fight promoter, correcting and demonstrating. The run-through finishes to rapt applause, Tomasson jumping to his feet to congratulate the choreographer. Lubovitch is pleased, too, though he soon starts worrying about whether part of the tarantella is working (not ''perverse'' enough, he suspects). Tension and creativity are inseparable for him, as they are for many artists, and the high stakes of ''Othello'' have only intensified the link. He goes home dissatisfied, as almost always, sleeps poorly, wakes before dawn and worries some more. ''Trial by fire,'' he mutters one afternoon, back at work with the dancers. ''Trial by fire.'' Originally published in The New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1997.
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