Donald McKayle
1930 — 2018 · Choreographer of Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder; the first Black man to both direct and choreograph major Broadway musicals
Donald McKayle was born in New York City on the sixth of July 1930 and raised in East Harlem, in a family of Jamaican descent. At seventeen, seeing Pearl Primus dance set his course; a scholarship to the New Dance Group followed in 1947, with no formal training behind him and Jean Erdman, Sophie Maslow, and Jane Dudley ahead; in time he danced in the orbits of Graham, Cunningham, and Sokolow, and served as dance captain in West Side Story.
His own works made the concert stage tell Black life plainly: Games (1951), the children's street cries turned choreography; Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1959), the southern chain gang rendered as one of modern dance's masterworks, kept alive in the Alvin Ailey repertory; District Storyville; Songs of the Disinherited.
Broadway gave him history: Golden Boy (1964); Raisin (1973), which he directed and choreographed — the show took the 1974 Tony for Best Musical, and he stands as the first Black man to both direct and choreograph major Broadway musicals; he conceived Sophisticated Ladies (1981) and shared its choreography. Five Tony nominations in all. For film he choreographed The Great White Hope and Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks; the Dance Heritage Coalition named him one of America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.
From 1989 he professed dance at UC Irvine for twenty-nine years, founding its Etude Ensemble and teaching to the end. He died at a hospital in Orange, California, on the sixth of April 2018, at eighty-seven, of complications of pneumonia. Honored be Donald McKayle, who made the rainbow bend round every shoulder in the house.
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