Bob Curtis

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Bob Curtis , actually Robert Leroy Curtis , (* 1. September 1925 in Leflore County , Mississippi ; † 9. December 2009 in Vienna , Austria ) was a dancer and choreographer of modern dance and painting . From the late 1960s onwards he became one of the most important representatives of the form of contemporary dance in Europe, which was shaped by African dance .

Life

Curtis, whose father was born into slavery , grew up in Mississippi as one of 18 children to a family of farmers. At the age of 17, he was drafted into military service in the US Navy in Alaska during World War II . After returning from the war, he studied fine arts at San Francisco State University from 1946 and began his training as a dancer at the San Francisco Ballet School . A scholarship took him to the George Balanchines School of American Ballet in New York City , where he also took lessons from Katherine Dunham , who specifically dealt with the connection of African dance with contemporary dance, through another scholarship . He earned money as a model for photographers. Whenever he could afford it, he also attended classes with Martha Graham , one of the most important choreographers in modern dance.

Engagements were hard to come by for African American dancers at the time. Dunham was the first Broadway choreographer to include blacks in her ensemble. Curtis' first professional work as a dancer was around 1952 in the operetta "Four Saints in Three Acts", which was played on Broadway and also made a guest appearance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris . But the work with Dunham was decisive for his further development as a dancer. She put together an experimental dance group and sent them to Haiti , Mexico and Cuba to study traditional dances. The stay in Haiti, where the dancers lived closely with the locals and where he got to know the dances of voodoo, was to prove to be formative for Curtis . In doing so, he mainly concentrated on the techniques of the dances and did not delve into the religious aspects of these traditions. From these dance forms, which are still close to their African origins, he gradually developed his own style, which he named Afro Contemporary , together with his training in classical ballet and modern dance .

After the study tour with Dunham's group, he joined that of José Limón , with whom he traveled through the USA. In his second year at Limón, a serious car accident ended his work as a dancer for the time being. He went to Cuba, where he had met the Tropicana choreographer during his previous stay , to work with him for a year. In 1955 he traveled to Europe with a friend, resumed dance studies with Roland Petit in Paris and got the chance to join his group. Instead, he decided to go to Italy, where he worked as a dancer in television shows and musicals until the late 1960s.

In 1968 Curtis founded the Afro Modern Dance Company together with Elsa Piperna and in 1972 the Teatro Danza Contemporaneo di Roma , one of the first stages for contemporary dance in Italy. In 1975 he returned to New York for two years to star in Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theater of Harlem . He then traveled to Rome again and founded his own new dance school, the Compagnia Afro Danza , with which he toured all of Europe until 1990. In addition, he taught in workshops in Austria, among others. When the end of the company became apparent, he accepted the offer to move to Vienna and from 1994 to teach at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz . From 1999 he was also a teacher at the Vienna State Opera .

In recent years Curtis has continued to lead individual dance workshops, devoted himself increasingly to his second artistic passion, painting, and presented his pictures in several exhibitions.

He was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery .

Individual evidence

  1. Youtube : Bob Curtis - In Memoriam

literature

Web links