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mahatmakanejeeves

(56,904 posts)
Sun Aug 2, 2020, 06:33 AM Aug 2020

On this day, August 2, 1911, Eugene Loring, choreographer of "Billy the Kid," was born.

Eugene Loring

Eugene Loring (August 2, 1911 – August 30, 1982) was an American dancer, choreographer, teacher, and administrator.

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Biography

Eugene Loring was born as Le Roy Kerpestein, the son of a saloon-keeper, grew up on a small island in the Milwaukee River in Wisconsin. He took gymnastic lessons. His artistic education in Milwaukee was formative. Nine years of piano training developed his musical ability broadly into orchestration, and his work with the Wisconsin Players, particularly under the direction of the Russian Boris Glagolin, developed his strong theatrical sense and gave him an awareness of dance as a theatrical force.

With savings from his job as a hardware-store manager, Loring went to New York City near the depth of the Great Depression in 1934, and was taken into George Balanchine's and Lincoln Kirstein's newly formed School of American Ballet. With the Russian Imperial training given by SAB, he danced with Balanchine's first American company, American Ballet, and even auditioned successfully for Michel Fokine. When Kirstein formed the specifically American choreographic training company Ballet Caravan in 1936, Loring and Lew Christensen (who together formed a little company, Dance Players, 1941–42) emerged as its outstanding products.

Within two years Loring choreographed and danced in Billy the Kid, which enjoys status as the first American ballet classic, with an unbroken history of production since. After choreographic residence at Bennington College, Vermont, where he made some works, Loring joined Ballet Theatre (now ABT) in 1939, where, in that company's first season, he choreographed and danced in his The Great American Goof, with libretto by William Saroyan.

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2015 | Arts & Culture

Eugene Loring, Mr. American Ballet

Once a giant of the stage, the choreographer of ”Billy the Kid” now is barely remembered.

Laura Bleiberg - February 12, 2015

The hard truth about death is that it inevitably brings obscurity, even to a legend. Artists are lucky—paintings, novels, poems, and music all secure some posthumous recognition. ¶ When the medium is dance, though, the equation is trickier. Even with the advent of videotape and written score, dance still is passed down largely through oral tradition. The key to longevity is the human connection, a chain created when each generation of performers teaches a ballet to the next.

Last fall, UC Irvine dance professor Molly Lynch invited students to audition for a revival of Eugene Loring’s Western-style, 1938 masterpiece, “Billy the Kid.”

Who? What?

Many of the students had no idea who Loring was, even though he was the founding chair of the university’s dance department. Still, about 120 of them auditioned for 23 spots in the cast. Sophomore Sara Schroerlucke was an exception among her classmates; she’d at least heard of Loring. Her mother, a clarinetist, played Aaron Copeland’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Billy” score.

“I didn’t know he was the founding chair,” Schroerlucke says before rehearsal. “But I was like, we’re doing ‘Billy the Kid.’ It’s not every day we get to do such an important and inspiring piece.”

Loring was only 27 when he made “Billy the Kid” for the short-lived Ballet Caravan, a company created by Lincoln Kirstein, the impresario who was devoted to establishing an American ballet—American stories by American choreographers, composers, and designers. “Billy” was a hit, and Loring was proclaimed a pioneer of American choreographers. In 1962, American Ballet Theatre performed it at the White House.

The 5-foot-4 Milwaukee native, who died in 1982, had a slew of other successes. A charter member of ABT, he made William Saroyan’s “The Great American Goof” for the troupe’s inaugural performance. He choreographed hit Broadway shows and acclaimed movie musicals, including “Silk Stockings” (1957). He developed a unique, well-rounded curriculum for his popular American School of Dance in Hollywood. And then there was the last major chapter of his life at UC Irvine’s dance department, when in 1965 he distinguished it from other public universities with a conservatory-style approach.

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I keep confusing this with "Rodeo." They are two different things.



DNB -- Billy the Kid (1938) by Eugene Loring
11,166 views•Jul 27, 2012

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This dance is notated in Labanotation. If you are interested in this dance for performance, educational, or research purposes, please visit the Dance Notation Bureau's (DNB) Notated Theatrical Dances Catalog at

http://dancenotation.org/catalog/EditDanceDetails.aspx?DanceID=338

For staging, educational, and research purposes, please email library@dancenotation.org
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