Eleo Pomare

Eleo Pomare was born on the twentieth of October 1937 in Santa Marta, Colombia, a child of the Afro-Colombian Caribbean coast. As a boy he lived in Colombia before the family moved to Panama, and the ocean itself marked his childhood: his seafaring father's cargo ship was torpedoed off the Panamanian coast during the Second World War. Around the age of ten Pomare was sent alone to New York City to live with relatives, carrying with him a heritage that spanned the Black Atlantic.

In New York he entered the High School of Performing Arts, where he was shaped by devoted teachers and encountered figures such as Martha Graham. He went on to train with Louis Horst, José Limón, and the pioneering African dance master Asadata Dafora, weaving classical modern technique together with African-derived rhythm. A John Hay Whitney scholarship carried him to Europe, where he studied with Kurt Jooss in Essen and worked abroad before returning home.

Settling in New York, Pomare founded the Eleo Pomare Dance Company in 1964, a troupe that outlived him. He became one of the defining choreographers of Black concert dance during the Black Power era, unafraid to make the stage a place of witness. His landmark works — the searing solo and suite Blues for the Jungle, the Lorca-rooted Las Desenamoradas, and Missa Luba — set the long history of African American struggle and dignity into unflinching movement.

His company carried his vision across North America, Europe, Australia, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, and he created well over one hundred dances before his death on the eighth of August 2008. May Eleo Pomare be honored as an ancestor who made the body speak the truth of a people, and who never once softened it for comfort.