Lar Lubovitch
Originally from Chicago, Lar Lubovitch began his dance training at The Juilliard School. In 1968, he created the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, which recently celebrated its 48th anniversary. For his company, he has choreographed over 100 dances, celebrated for their musicality, humanity, and rhapsodic style. Over the years, the company has appeared in almost every state in the US and toured internationally. Lubovitch has been the recipient of numerous national endowment awards, including several «masterpiece grants» for the reconstruction of seminal works.
His dances have also appeared in the repertoire of major dance companies throughout the world. His Othello, A Dance in Three Acts (1997), a three-way co-production of his company, American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Ballet, was broadcast on PBS’s Great Performances and nominated for an Emmy award. His dances on film also include Fandango, seen on PBS (International Emmy Award), and My Funny Valentine, for the Robert Altman film The Company (American Choreography Award).
Lubovitch has also made a notable contribution in the field of ice dancing with dances for Olympians John Curry, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, and in subsequent years for Paul Wylie, Brian Orser and others. For Anglia Television in Great Britain, he created a full-length ice-dance special, The Sleeping Beauty, which was also broadcast on PBS, and for the A&E network, he created The Planets, starring Olympic ice dancers Paul and Isabelle Duchesnay (nominated for an International Emmy, Cable Ace and Grammy awards). In 2004, he was honored by the Ice Theater of New York, with an award for his contribution to the advancement of ice dancing.
Lubovitch made his Broadway debut in 1987 with choreography for Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods for which he received a Tony nomination. In 1993, he received the Astaire Award from the Theatre Development Fund for his dances in The Red Shoes. In 1996, he created new dances for the Tony Award winning revival of The King and I and, in 2002, the choreography for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Berlin.
In 2007, Lubovitch created the Chicago Dancing Festival, launched in collaboration with the City of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art which, now in its seventh season, includes five days of performances taking place in four major theatres in downtown Chicago, featuring a national roster of leading American dance companies. The festival is seen every August by an audience of 15,000 people and is presented entirely free to the public. In 2007, he was named Chicagoan of the Year by the Chicago Herald Tribune, and in 2008 by Chicago Magazine.
In 2011, he was named a Ford Fellow by United States Artists, and that same year he received the Dance/USA Honors Award. In 2012, he received the Prix Benois de la Danse for choreography at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In 2013, he was presented with the American Dance Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and in May of 2014, the Juilliard School in New York City awarded him an honorary doctorate. Lubovitch has been appointed as a Distinguished Professor by the University of California — Irvine to being in the fall of 2016.