Remembering Eleo Pomare

From our friends at Attitude The Dancer's Magazine:

(Press Release Excerpt)

August 8, 2008

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.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 Haiti’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 South Africa.

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 born in Colombia, 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 Germany, Holland, Sweden and Norway. In 1964 he returned to the United States, revived and expanded his original American dance company which has since toured throughout the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the West Indies, Australia, Spain, and Italy. His company performed at numerous venues including: Broadway’s ANTA Theatre, Washington’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, New York’s City Center, Florence Gould Hall, and the Joyce Theater, Montreal’s Theatre Maisonneuve, the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia.

The Board of Directors of the Eleo Pomare Dance Company requests that donations be made to the Eleo Pomare Dance Company, Inc. at 325 West 16th Street, New York, NY 10011 to support the documentation of the on-going legacy of Mr. Pomare’s artistic achievement.