Geoffrey Holder

Geoffrey Lamont Holder was born on the first of August 1930 at Port of Spain, Trinidad, the youngest of four children of Arthur Holder — a Black-Trinidadian merchant of the Port of Spain Maraval district — and Louise de Frense Holder, an amateur painter and dressmaker. He was raised in the Trinidadian-Catholic professional household of his father across the closing decade of the British colonial period.

He was placed at six at the Queen’s Royal College at Port of Spain and at twelve at the Tranquillity Boys’ Government School.

He was given his first formal dance training at six by his elder brother Boscoe Holder — the principal Trinidadian concert-dance figure of the late colonial period and the founder of the Boscoe Holder Dance Company. Geoffrey trained at the Boscoe Holder Dance Company from 1936 to 1952 and was the principal male dancer of the company across the closing years of the 1940s and the early 1950s.

He was hired in 1952 by Agnes de Mille on a Carnival visit to Port of Spain — for the Manhattan tour of the Geoffrey Holder Dance Company. He moved with the Boscoe Holder Dance Company to Manhattan in 1953 at twenty-three.

He was hired in 1954 by the Metropolitan Opera as a principal solo dancer — at the principal Metropolitan production of Aida, La Périchole, and Salomé — and danced the principal solo dance role at the Metropolitan Opera from 1954 to 1956.

He was hired in 1957 by Truman Capote and Harold Arlen for the principal solo dance role at the Broadway production House of Flowers at the Alvin Theatre — opposite Alvin Ailey (placed in this archive) as a member of the chorus.

He was awarded in 1957 the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical at the House of Flowers production — at twenty-six.

He choreographed in 1968 the off-Broadway musical Lola Falana Sings the Blues at the Beulah Bondi Theatre — among the principal Black-American off-Broadway musical productions of the period.

He choreographed and directed in 1975 The Wiz at the Majestic Theatre, Broadway and Forty-Fourth Street, Manhattan — the Black-American Broadway musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. The Wiz opened on the fifth of January 1975 and ran 1,672 performances at the Majestic — the second-longest run of any Broadway musical of the 1970s.

He was awarded the 1975 Tony Award for Best Choreography and the 1975 Tony Award for Best Director of a Musical for The Wiz — the first African American director of a Broadway musical to win the Tony for Best Director.

He directed in 1978 the principal Black-American Broadway musical of the period — Timbuktu! at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, Broadway and Fifty-First Street — an Africanist adaptation of the Forrest and Wright Kismet musical. The Timbuktu! production ran 221 performances.

He was a senior commercial-and-print-advertising figure of the post-Wiz period — the principal Black-American spokesperson-and-narrator of the 7-Up advertising campaign of the late 1970s and the 1980s, with the line ‘the UnCola’.

He painted across the closing decades of the twentieth century the principal Black-Trinidadian post-impressionist work of the period — over five hundred oils, watercolours and lithographs that toured the principal American museums of the period.

He died at Manhattan on the fifth of October 2014 of complications of pneumonia, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the first Black Tony Award winner for Best Director.