Bruce Wood mentor Lar Lubovitch returns to Dallas for gala dance performance

When Bruce Wood started dancing in choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s New York company in the 1980s, the two became fast friends. “He was very funny outside of work, a very entertaining person to spend time with,” Lubovitch said about Wood in a 2021 interview. He credits the Fort Worth native with being “quite a big mover, broad and in the ground … He had a lot of passion.”

A few years after Wood’s death in 2014 at age 53, the now 80-year-old Lubovitch began a relationship with Dallas-based Bruce Wood Dance, formed in 2010 and still at it today. Wood cited Lubovitch as an influence on his musicality and emotional choreographic style.

Two years ago, the company performed Lubovitch’s breezy Elemental Brubeck, a tribute to the social dances of the 1950s. Now he has returned to set two other works on the dancers, including the premiere of Conversing with Brahms accompanied by pianist José Antonio Cubela, for an all-Lubovitch program at Bruce Wood Dance’s 13th Anniversary Performance and Gala.

An earlier work to the German composer’s music, 1985′s A Brahms Symphony, established Lubovitch as a major figure in modern dance. Subbing for an injured Doug Varone, Wood learned the piece in a day. “He rescued that dance and did marvelously,” Lubovitch said. “From that time on, he was in the company.”

Wood also appeared in its follow-up, Concerto Six Twenty-Two, another cornerstone in the Lubovitch oeuvre. The Mozart-fueled work is also on Bruce Wood Dance’s April 29 program.

One of the last living choreographers trained by modern dance pioneers like Martha Graham and José Limón, Lubovitch came to the practice relatively late. A native of Chicago, he wanted to be a painter until an encounter with a dance professor in a college gymnastics class set him on a new path. “I realize I’ve been painting in space all this time,” he said, “and the dancers have been the paint, filling the entire canvas.”

Details

April 29 at Moody Performance Hall, 2520 Flora St. $45-$75 for performance only. Individual seats and group tables for the gala dinner and performance $375-$10,000.