While training as an architect at MIT, Gus Solomons jr (1938-2023) began taking dance classes and found his calling. After graduation, he moved to New York at the suggestion of Donald McKayle and soon began performing with Martha Graham, Pearl Lang, Joyce Trisler, and others. He first danced at Jacob’s Pillow in 1962, appearing in a revival of Ted Shawn’s Kinetic Molpai. In 1965, he became the first Black dancer in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and then formed his own group in the late 1960s. Still performing up until the year before his death, he founded a company for older dancers with Carmen de Lavallade and Dudley Williams in 1996, calling it Paradigm. He wrote dance criticism for a number of publications and taught widely, including three decades at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. The New York Times described the dance seen here by saying it “uses geometrical patterns to suggest emotional encounters, and Ken Schafer’s score translates steps into sound by means of an electronic sensor attached to the dance space.”
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