DANCE COLLECTION DANSE

Call it the importance of being Elizabeth Langley.
The octogenarian dancer-choreographer
and educator has been variously described
as a mentor, a teacher, an innovator … and an original,
outspoken woman who can be brutally honest.
Dancer-choreographer Denise Fujiwara worked with
Langley for twenty years. She says she was exposed to,
and benefitted from, the full force of Langley’s “many
qualities that make her intimidating to work with: an
incisive eye, a critical intelligence, an inability to lie about
the work, a sophisticated aesthetic sense and an impatience,
which means she does not suffer fools gladly.”
Langley’s vision and discipline continues to influence
Zelma Badu-Younge, professor of dance at Ohio University
and a Concordia dance graduate. She’s deferential to
her mentor’s “beauty, grace, power, strength, brilliance
and a wealth of knowledge and intelligence. Such an
engaging and creative spirit here on earth guiding, teaching
and inspiring us all with honesty and pure heart.”
Asked why she chose dance, Langley replies, “I don’t
think I was supposed to be a dancer. But I’ve had a really
good life, so I don’t feel badly about it. I think I was meant
to be an actress.” Her sister, ten years older, had already
“confiscated that performance mode.” Langley’s upbringing,
like many Australian children, was very physical.
“I had played every sport since I could stand on my two
feet. And I used to do my ‘thing’. I didn’t even know a
word to describe it at that point.” She’d dance and “interpret
the music,” says Langley. “Then one of my brother’s
girlfriends said to me, ‘Oh, I go to a studio where they
do that.’ Now, the idea of people coming together to do
my ‘thing’ was really exciting. So my mother took me
to the [dance] studio.” The next week … she began.
In 1951 Langley took a teacher’s course in creative
dance. Two years later she was offered a job teaching
adult and children’s dance classes. For seven
years, she packed thirty-five to forty classes per week
into her gruelling schedule, plus personal training,
choreography and performing. “It was total absorption.
I’d lie in bed at night bone-tired.” But she says,
“If you can turn your passion into your profession,
you’ll be one of the happiest people in the world.”
She was married briefly, for one year, in 1958. “It was
one of the things you did,” she says. 1960 was a turning
point. Harry Belafonte’s company was touring Australia,
and some of his musicians came to a friend’s party.
She jokes that she was wearing a “horrible green and
Top left: Elizabeth Langley teaching in Melbourne, Australia,
late 1950s
Bottom left: Elizabeth Langley, 1964
Photo: Guenter Karkutt
Top right: Elizabeth Langley rehearsing Angst, directed by
Denis Faulkner for CBC television, 1974
blue tartan ensemble.” Regardless, she met Belafonte’s
accompanist Ernesto Calabria, and for the length of
the tour they were “inseparable”. It was decided that
Langley should join him in New York and become his
common-law wife. Belafonte sponsored her student
visa to attend the Martha Graham School. A letter dated
October 10, 1960, written by Hanny Kolm Exiner, principal
at the Studio of Creative Dancing, in Melbourne,
supported her application. Langley, it states, has “intelligence,
imagination, and great zest … She is a forceful
dancer, with originality and a great sense of comedy.”
She arrived in New York to a huge snowfall. Wading
through snow banks, she made her way to Graham’s
beautiful studios on East 63rd Street. She watched faculty
class. “I said I am going to stay here until I know that,” she
recalls. Even with all her experience, she was placed as a
beginner. Graham told her, “You don’t even know how to
breathe.” Langley gives a vivid description of the legendary
Graham. “She was very short. Her body proportions
were Asian, long spine and short legs. Her stacked
hairstyle extended her height. At this stage she had a
drinking problem, but she was an incredible genius.” She
stayed with Graham five years. “What I loved about the
Graham technique is that you danced from your gut to
your fingertips and not from your fingertips to nowhere.”
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