Beverly Blossom, Solo Dancer With a ‘Voice,’ Dies at 88

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Beverly Blossom in 2005.CreditMiichael Lopez for The New York Times

Beverly Blossom, a modern-dance choreographer and teacher and a daring, vividly imaginative solo performer, died on Saturday in Chicago. She was 88.

Her son and only immediate survivor, Michael Blossom, said the cause was cancer. Ms. Blossom, who lived in Chicago, died at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, he said.

Ms. Blossom was best known later in her career, from the 1980s on, as one of the most distinguished — and zaniest — solo performers in modern dance. She had only to walk quietly onto a stage, statuesque and slightly quizzical, and disparate worlds would be evoked, bursting into the light.

Her dances were set to a broad variety of scores, from Bach to 1930s cartoon music to familiar popular songs of the time, including “The Way We Were.” Simple props figured in her dances, most memorably a battered black top hat. In a signature solo piece,“Dad’s Ties” (1983), she mourned her father’s death, with neckties swinging madly under her voluminous black skirt. She was vivid onstage: bright red dyed hair set off by the “shabby black” she favored, a coinage that became the title of one of her dance programs. In her later years, the magnificent ruin of her face mirrored the tragicomic quality of many of her dances, which seemed to ravel and unravel simultaneously.

“I always have to tell the hairdresser that I want to look like Bozo the Clown,” Ms. Blossom said of her hair in a 1999 interview with The New York Times. She aimed at a “wrecked look,” she said, in off-the-rack costumes that were peculiar but somehow stylish.

“I just bought something the other day that looks like a catastrophe,” she continued. “A green shawl, like moss. I don’t like ‘pretty’ very much.”

In her “Besame Mucho” (1987), another signature piece, inspired costuming by Richard Hornung helped her become, interchangeably, an uncertain old gigolo and his aging, slightly dopey female partner as they danced a fervent tango.

Ms. Blossom also created works for other dancers, among them a young company that included her students at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she taught from 1966 to 1990 and returned late in life to become professor emeritus of dance. Her students included Meredith Monk and the New York choreographer Henning Rübsam.

Ms. Blossom’s haunting “Poem for the Theater No. 6,” a solo she performed live with a subtle integration of her filmed image, came out of the innovative multimedia explorations that thrived in the East Village in the 1960s. She created the piece as a participant in the Filmstage theater, founded by the actor and poet Roberts Blossom, to whom she was married from 1967 to 1970. She was born Beverly Schmidt in Chicago on Aug. 28, 1926, to Theodore and Florence Schmidt. Her father was a dentist, her mother a homemaker. She received a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1950 and a master’s in dance from Sarah Lawrence College in 1953. Her teachers included Mary Wigman, the German expressionist modern-dance choreographer and performer.

She settled in New York City, where from 1953 to 1963 she was a principal dancer with the Nikolais Dance Theater, becoming one of several intensely individual dancer-choreographers in the lineage of the dancer and choreographer Alwin Nikolais and his longtime creative partner, Murray Louis. (“Shards,” a 1993 tribute to Nikolais, who died that year, was a solo of dark pathos that ended with Ms. Blossom hailing a cab: Life moves on.) In 1957, as a Fulbright scholar, she studied with Wigman in Germany and was strongly influenced by the work of Bertolt Brecht. She began to choreograph in the 1960s and in 1990 came back to New York, where she became an underground favorite. She received a Bessie Award for sustained achievement in 1993.

Ms. Blossom returned to Chicago in 2001 and continued to teach and choreograph. Her last performance, in 2010, was part of a Nikolais tribute at Hunter College in Manhattan.

In her 1999 Times interview, Ms. Blossom was asked what made a good solo performer. “You can’t be a blank-minded ingénue,” she replied. “There must be a dance persona that is rich, that has layers of interest. A soloist has to have a ‘voice,’ the way a singer does. And it has to do with — not exactly beauty, but something that consumes the whole space. A good soloist has to know the tricks of the trade too. How loud to sing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/arts/dance/beverly-blossom-solo-dancer-with-a-voice-dies-at-88.html?_r=0