Lester Horton

Lester Horton (born January 23, 1906, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died November 2, 1953, Los Angeles, California) was a dancer and choreographer credited with launching the modern dance movement in Los Angeles and for establishing the country’s first racially integrated dance company. In his short career he developed a dance training technique that continued to be used by instructors into the 21st century.

Horton’s initial interest in movement was inspired by Native American dance (he had been fascinated by Native American culture since childhood) and by performances he saw by modern dancers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn and the Denishawn Dancers. He began studying ballet as an adolescent at a studio in Indianapolis. In 1925 he studied with Forrest Thornburg—a teacher who had been trained at the Denishawn School of Dance—and then moved to Chicago to study briefly with Russian American ballet dancer and choreographer Adolph Bolm as well as at the school of Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky. In 1926–27 Horton participated in his first stage production, a pageant he produced in Indianapolis in collaboration with amateur playwright Clara Nixon Bates, who had based her play on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Song of Hiawatha. For the production, Horton proceeded in a manner he came to employ throughout his career, becoming involved not only in the choreography but also in the staging and the costumes. He was ultimately given his big break in the role of Hiawatha. In preparation for his performance, Horton traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to learn dances and chants from Native American performers. After the production traveled to Los Angeles, Horton chose to remain there and to continue studying dance.

In Los Angeles he studied with Japanese dancer and choreographer Michio Itō, from whom he learned to integrate props into his choreography and present dance as dramatic theatre. In the early 1930s Horton began teaching in a local dance studio run by Norma Gould. His teaching style was inventive and dynamic, often requiring his students to improvise and move in unusual, exaggerated, and distinctly unballetic ways. As his teaching career took off, Horton also focused on choreography. Two of his early works are Kootenai War Dance (1931) and Voodoo Ceremonial (1932), both performed in 1932 by the newly formed Lester Horton Dance Group at the Olympic Festival of the Dance (held during that year’s Olympic games) at the Los Angeles Philharmonic auditorium. The latter piece surprised audiences with its erotic display of pagan rituals.

In 1934 the young Bella Lewitzky took a class with Horton at Gould’s studio. Lewitzky became the lead dancer in Horton’s company and his close creative collaborator over the next 15 years. In the mid-1930s Horton choreographed protest pieces such as Dictator (1935) and Prelude to Militancy (1937; with Lewitzky), both of which responded to the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. A major highlight in Horton’s career was his choreography of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), performed in the Hollywood Bowl amphitheatre in 1937, with Lewitzky in the lead role as the Chosen One. This was the first time the Stravinsky score had been choreographed by an American, and many in the audience were shocked by the barefooted dancers contorting themselves into angular and rigid movements.

In 1942 Horton began choreographing for Hollywood movies. Given his interest in blending cultural references, he often worked on films with stories set in exotic locales, such as Moonlight in Havana (1942), White Savage (1943), Phantom of the Opera (1944), and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1945). He went on to choreograph 19 films over the following 11 years.

With Lewitzky, her husband (Newell Reynolds), and dancer William Bowne, Horton opened the Dance Theater in Los Angeles, a performance space and dance academy. On opening night in 1948 the dancers performed Horton’s Totem Incantation, based on a Native American coming-of-age rite; a revised version of his earlier interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s one-act play Salomé; and The Beloved (all 1948), based on a newspaper article about a man who suspected his wife of infidelity and beat her to death with a Bible. The Beloved, co-choreographed with Lewitzky, is widely regarded to be a classic example of modern dance and one of Horton’s masterpieces.

In 1950, just two years after forming the Dance Theater, Lewitzky and Reynolds left the theatre and Horton’s company; Bowne had left even earlier. Horton rebuilt the company and, in so doing, launched the careers of new members Carmen de Lavallade and James Truitte. Notable works from the early 1950s include Another Touch of Klee (1951), Liberian Suite (1952), Prado de Pena (1952), and Dedication to José Clemente Orozco (1953; from his Dedications in Our Time series). Horton’s dance company finally had its New York City debut in March 1953. That performance was met with rave reviews, and it prompted invitations for more performances around the country.

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When Horton died suddenly of a heart attack in November 1953, Alvin Ailey, who had been taking classes at the Dance Theater since 1949, took over as director of the company for two years before moving to New York City, where he became one of the most successful American modern dance choreographers and always cited Horton as one of his primary influences. The Dance Theater continued to operate under the management of Horton’s partner, Frank Eng, through 1960.