Eleo Pomare

Eleo Pomare was born on the twenty-second of October 1937 at Cartagena, Colombia, the son of an Afro-Colombian household of the Cartagena Caribbean coastal community. The family migrated to Panama in the closing years of the 1930s and to New York in 1947 when Pomare was ten.

He was placed at the Harlem Public Schools and at the High School of Performing Arts at Manhattan — the principal post-war Manhattan performing-arts public secondary school. He was admitted at fourteen on the strength of an audition for the dance programme.

He trained at the High School of Performing Arts from 1951 to 1955 under the principal post-war modernist-dance choreographers — including Karel Shook, Daniel Lewis, and Helen Tamiris.

He took further training in Germany on a 1957 John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship — among the principal post-war Black-American modernist-dance European-tour fellowships of the period — under the principal post-war German modernist-dance choreographer Kurt Jooss at the Folkwang Schule at Essen-Werden from 1957 to 1959.

He founded in 1958 at Manhattan the Eleo Pomare Dance Company — the principal Black-American Black-Power-era concert-dance company of the closing years of the 1960s and the 1970s. He directed the company for the following thirty-five years through to the closing months of his life.

He choreographed in 1966 the principal work of his career — Junkie, a twenty-minute solo concert-dance work on the principal post-1965 Manhattan heroin epidemic — for the Eleo Pomare Dance Company at the Manhattan Henry Street Settlement Playhouse on the seventeenth of June 1966. Junkie was the principal post-1965 Black-American concert-dance work on the Harlem heroin trade of the period.

He choreographed across the closing years of the 1960s and the 1970s the principal Black-Power-era Black-American concert-dance works — including Black on Black (1968) on the closing-period Manhattan street life; Las Desenamoradas (1967) on the Federico García Lorca tradition; Roots (1972) on the post-Black-Power period Black-American genealogical work; and the dance-cycle Missa Luba (1965) on the Belgian-Congolese Catholic mass tradition.

He was the principal Black-American concert-dance choreographer of the principal post-1965 Harlem and the Manhattan stages of the 1970s.

He served as a principal teacher at the principal post-war American concert-dance institutions of the closing years of the twentieth century — at the Bates Dance Festival at Lewiston, Maine; the American Dance Festival at Duke University; the Manhattan Henry Street Settlement Dance Studio; and the New Dance Group at Manhattan.

He was awarded in 1995 the principal Bessie Award of the Manhattan modernist-dance community — the Bessie Schönberg/Dance Theater Workshop New York Dance and Performance Award for his lifetime contribution to the post-war American concert-dance tradition.

He died at Manhattan on the thirteenth of August 2008 of complications of liver cancer, at seventy.

He is honored here as the principal Black-Power-era choreographer.