This film is about the work of American artists, Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder who stepped forward in the 1950's to play a vital part in the newly energized world of modern dance. It is also about a forty-seven year long marriage and creative partnership that has sustained their accomplishments. Over the past three years, Linda Atkinson (a student of Carmen’s) and Nick Doob have filmed the virtually uninterrupted creativity of this couple, now in their 70’s. The film’s style is spontaneous, intimate and revealing, showing Carmen and Geoffrey’s natural penchant for uncommon good humor.
Lead Sponsor of Harlem Stage on Screen HBO
Co-Presented with the Black Documentary Collective
www.firstrunfeatures.com/carmenandgeoffrey_synopsis.html
Linda Atkinson
Linda Atkinson first met Carmen and Geoffrey while she was studying acting at the Yale School of Drama. She graduated with an MFA having won the Carol Dye Acting Prize. She has performed in theaters around the country including the Old Globe, the Yale Reperatory Tehatre, the Indiana Repertory Theatre, the Folger Theatre and the Alaska Repertory Theatre. In New York, she has performed at Playwright’s Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club, The Public Theater and with Lyn Austin’s Lenox Theater Group. She began directing in 1983 and worked at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Indiana Repertory Theatre, the Peterborough Players, WestBank Theater Bar and for NBC’s Another World. She then began working with her husband, Nick Doob, to produce a prize winning series of health related documentaries for high school students. She is currently producing a film based on a chapter from Robert Coles’s Women of Crisis. In addition, she has recently directed an original play, Fineprint, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
Geoffrey Holder
Dancer, choreographer, and actor Geoffrey Holder was born on August 20, 1930 in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, into a middle-class family of four children. He was taught painting and dancing by his older brother Boscoe Holder, whose dance troupe (the Holder Dance Company) the young Geoffrey joined when he was seven-years old. Geoffrey assumed direction of the company in the late 1940s after Boscoe moved to London. Holder moved to the United States in 1954, two years after being "discovered" by Agnes de Mille, the choreographer daughter of director-producer Cecil B. DeMille, after she saw the Holder Dance Company perform in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Holder made his Broadway debut (as did Diahann Carroll) in 1954 at the Alvin Theatre in the Caribbean-themed original musical House of Flowers. The cast included Pearl Bailey and Alvin Ailey and Holder met and married fellow cast member Carmen DeLavallade. From 1955 through 1956, Holder was a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Holder played the role of Lucky in a revival of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot directed by Herbert Berghof on Broadway in January 1957. Holder won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical for his staging of the Broadway musical The Wiz (1975), the all African American retelling of The Wizard of Oz. As a choreographer, he has created dance pieces for many companies, including the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Charmaine Warren
Warren is a performer, historian, consultant and dance writer who serves as a faculty member at Alvin Ailey/Fordham University and New York University/Tisch School of the Arts-The Classical Theatre. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Howard University where she taught for eight years, a Masters Degree in Dance Research, Reconstruction and Choreography, and two Bachelor’s Degrees: one in Speech & Theatre/Dance and the other in English. She has lectured and taught movement nationally and internationally. Warren generally lectures on western dance history, the Black tradition in American dance and Jamaican dance. After performing for many years with major New York dance companies, she joined the internationally known, New York-based, dance/theater company David Rousseve/REALITY in 1989. She is a member of the Committee on Research in Dance, Dance History Scholars, Dance Critics Associations.
