Less than two weeks after Loris Beckles moved to Dallas, his partner died of complications from AIDS. Andre R. George had come to the city in 1994 to join Dallas Black Dance Theatre. The next year, George launched his own troupe, Nova: A Dancers’ Company.
Rather than returning to New York, where he had performed for years in the Alvin Ailey junior companies and for the groundbreaking choreographer Eleo Pomare, Beckles decided to stay and carry on George’s work and his own in Dallas.
Over three decades, he has made his reputation training young dancers at the South Dallas Cultural Center and Greiner Middle School, some of whom who have gone on to bigger stages. He has put on performances of his choreography and that of guest artists and revived pieces by Pomare and other historically significant Black dance-makers like Donald McKayle.
Eventually renamed Beckles Dancing Company, his group is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a pair of performances at the Latino Cultural Center.
The shows include 13 pieces, most of them choreographed by Beckles, including First Arabesque, a solo he made for himself to perform with his Blue Mercury Dancing Company when he was still living in New York. It’s set to a Debussy piano composition.
“There’s a turn with the leg up in second position and pauses to suspend the movement so it can coincide with the resonance of the music between notes,” Beckles says. “I was pushing myself to hold the balance.”
It will be performed by guest artist Tristan Rodney. “It’s up to me to convey that feeling into another mind and body, to bring out the essence of what I was thinking,” Beckles says. “I want to see it again to reemphasize how simple and difficult it is.”
There will also be works by Pomare, McKayle and guest choreographers Anthony Wade Jr. and Randall Anthony Smith.
‘In the soul’
Beckles, 71, is a humble, soft-spoken man. In an interview at Sammons Center for the Arts, where the company has its office, he says too much of a big deal is being made out of the landmark anniversary, including a red carpet at the shows planned by the company’s managing director, Dedre Brent, whose two daughters trained under Beckles.
He walks with a limp due to damage done by progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, the result of a weakened immune system caused by his HIV-positive status. “I’m glad to still be here, alive and able to pass on the information I have learned, not just as in a textbook but in the soul,” he says.
The oldest of seven siblings, Beckles was born in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, and immigrated to New York a couple of years after his parents. He was 14. By that time, the dance bug had bit him at a performance by a Venezuelan ballet company he had seen at his high school.
He says he was flabbergasted when the dancers landed after flying through the air. It made him realize they were human. “I was staying with my dad’s brother and his family. My uncle offered the boy cousin and me piano lessons and the girl cousin ballet lessons. She didn’t want them, but I didn’t know how to say, ‘I want them.’ Because little boys didn’t do ballet.”
After young Loris joined his parents in New York, he saw a boy dancing at an assembly at Newtown High School in Queens, where he was enrolled. He discovered the school had a Modern Dance Club. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, I gotta go. That’s me, too.’ ”
He learned his classmate was taking lessons off campus. Soon he was in classes at the Ramsey School of Music Dance, too, and performing at the school’s recitals.
“I think that my first ballet teacher,” Beckles recalls, “she looked at the flexibility of my arches and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll find a way to use you. We’ll dress you up. And if you can lift girls, great.’ Now, I’m like, ‘Was she crazy?’ ”
Soon he began seeking out other educational opportunities in the field, like a modern dance class he found at New York University, where he also started attending performances. He remembers being struck by an early show of Pilobolus, then a young company of Dartmouth students.
After being turned down by NYU and the Juilliard School, Beckles wound up earning a dance degree from Adelphi University on Long Island, where he met all kinds of people and gained confidence.
His senior year he was hired without an audition by Syracuse Ballet Theatre, whose directors came to see him perform in class. It was his first professional job.
“Those four years at Adelphi really prepared me, technically, and gave me a work ethic and focus,” Beckles says. “Syracuse was not a top-of-the-line ballet company, but you still have to point your feet and know your positions.”
That sense of discipline is among the lessons he’s passed on to his many students, including Lela Bell Wesley, who’s still a member of his company. She’s slated to appear at the anniversary concerts with guest artists Claude Alexander III, Jennifer Mabus, Michelle Gibson and Lacy and Layla Brent, the latter currently on tour in The Lion King, along with veteran dancer-choreographer Tina Mullone Griffith and other company members.
Details
May 30-31 at 7 p.m. at 2600 Live Oak St. $22-$33. becklesdancingco.org. ticketdfw.com/event/thirtieth-anniversary-gala-celebration.
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