Donald McKayle

Donald Cohen McKayle was born on the sixth of July 1930 at Manhattan, the son of a Caribbean-American household of the Harlem inter-war period. He was raised in the West-Indian-Harlem of the 1930s and 1940s and educated at the principal Harlem public schools.

He was placed at the Harlem-area DeWitt Clinton High School at the Bronx and was given his first formal dance instruction at sixteen at the New Dance Group at Manhattan — the principal post-Denishawn-and-pre-Martha-Graham left-wing modernist-dance studio of the period — on a scholarship he obtained on the strength of an audition.

He trained at the New Dance Group from 1946 to 1952 under the principal post-war modernist-dance teachers Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, Pearl Primus (placed in this archive), and Jean Erdman.

He was hired in 1947 by Pearl Primus for the Pearl Primus Dance Company as a member of the company — at seventeen — and toured with the Primus company across the closing years of the 1940s and the early 1950s.

He choreographed his first solo concert-dance work — the Games at the YMHA Ninety-Second Street Y on the eleventh of February 1951 — on the Black-Harlem children’s street-game tradition. Games was the principal early-1950s post-war modernist-and-Africanist choreographic synthesis of the Black-Harlem street life and entered the New York concert-dance repertoire of the 1950s.

He choreographed in 1959 the principal early-career work — Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder, a thirty-minute dance work on the southern-chain-gang work-song tradition. Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder premiered at the YMHA Ninety-Second Street Y on the tenth of May 1959 and is at this day a principal repertoire piece of the principal American concert-dance companies of the post-war period.

He choreographed in 1972 the principal Broadway work of his career — the four-act musical Sophisticated Ladies on the Duke Ellington (placed in this archive) jazz-songbook of the 1920s through 1940s. Sophisticated Ladies opened at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, Broadway and Forty-Sixth Street on the first of March 1981 and ran 767 performances.

He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Choreography in 1962, 1971, 1972, 1976, and 1981 — among the most-nominated Black-American choreographers in Tony Awards history.

He choreographed at the principal modernist-dance companies of the post-war period over fifty concert-dance works for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (Mary Lou’s Mass, 1971), the Limón Dance Company (Songs of the Disinherited, 1972), the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company at Denver, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

He served from 1989 as professor of dance at the University of California at Irvine — the principal Black-American concert-dance professor of the West Coast — and held the Irvine chair for twenty-nine years through to his death in 2018.

He died at Long Beach, California on the sixth of April 2018 of complications of cancer, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the choreographer of Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder.