WASHINGTON--At one point in ``Owen's Song,'' a musical tribute to the poet Owen Dodson, a young actress climbed a series of steps and then leapt from the highest platform into the arms of several men. The audience gasped and the chorus broke out tambourines and marched with the winged actress down the aisles. This was a Mike Malone moment, well before wires protected talent, well before Cirque du Soleil made this aerial vision look easy.
This was Mike Malone in the early 1970s, testing the limits of theatrical style, grooming the young cast of ``Owen's Song'' and taking them from Georgia Avenue to the Kennedy Center to New York. All the while he was making sure the work of a black pioneer was remembered. Malone, the choreographer, director and teacher who died Monday at 63, was a stalwart of the Washington theater community for nearly 40 years.
He believed in building institutions where the arts would be an avenue for creativity for young people, and enjoyment for all. In 1968 he was a founder, along with Peggy Cooper Cafritz, of Workshops for Careers in the Arts. When the DC Black Repertory Company wanted a dance company as part of its professional programs, Malone started the company in 1971.
In 1974 Malone and Cafritz pushed the city for an arts high school. He was the first artistic director at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. He taught at Washington's historically black Howard University and was coordinator of its musical theater program.
His staging of ``Black Nativity,'' a revival of poet Langston Hughes' play, became a holiday standard. ``He left a school with a legacy and a purpose to continually fill the ranks of America's artists with highly trained African American artists,'' Cafritz said. ``I don't think that goal exists anywhere else in high schools or colleges.
'' Charles Augins, chairman of Ellington's dance department, emphasized the sweep of his training: Malone had graduated from Georgetown University, studied at the Sorbonne and danced at the Folies Bergere. He was a disciplined free-form dancer. ``He was a modern jazz dancer, and he represented the Gang Gang style, based much more on African movement.
But he was ballet-trained, and anything he did had 10 arabesques,'' Augins said. Glenda Dickerson, professor of theater and drama at the University of Michigan, was co-director of ``Owen's Song'' and thought Malone's idea of the flying actress was crazy. She admits now that it was the perfect touch.
``For all his brilliance ...
his most important contribution was he collected a cadre of loyal, extremely devoted artists,'' she said. Foremost among those is Debbie Allen, the award-winning actress, dancer and choreographer who met Malone at a party at Howard in the 1970s. ``He told me I was a dancer.
I had stopped dancing altogether after a rejection from the North Carolina School of the Arts,'' Allen, who runs her own dance academy in Santa Monica, Calif., recalled this week. ``He was responsible for me finding my path when I got lost.
'' Over the years, I watched Mike work many times. One evening, rehearsing for the street theater play ``Everyman,'' he had dozens of teen-agers moving around and laughing loudly on a corner near Howard University. The nattily dressed director was patiently teaching them to transform their awkwardness into dance movements.
He yelled, he coddled, and exuberance was the result. During rehearsal for his ``Black Nativity'' at the Kennedy Center, he fretted that he was working the performers too much: ``Sometimes the spontaneity is gone because they are so ready. Then you have to manufacture it and it doesn't come off as real.
'' That staging of ``Nativity'' sold out for several seasons and Malone was nominated for two Helen Hayes Awards. He won in 1994 for his choreography of ``Spunk'' at Studio Theatre. ``Mike had a specialty in advancing new work and new pieces .
.. like Black Broadway,'' said Joseph Selmon, chairman of Howard's theater arts department.
``Secondly, he had a passion for bringing works out of the African American canon ...
'Tambourines to Glory,' 'Timbuktu.' '' And he knew each generation had to stamp its own uniqueness on the work. ``Mike was not just about preserving the works of Langston Hughes, not just about dealing with slave narratives.
He was also on the pulse of hip-hop narratives as well. He saw no conflict in fusing those forms,'' Cafritz said. You must be a user to post comments.
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