Join Dance/USA in recognizing this year's Honor Award recipient Lar Lubovitch.

Honor Award
Lar Lubovitch

“I was a freshman art major at the University of Iowa (doing gymnastics as well), when I saw the Jose Limon Dance Company.  I had never seen dance before, though I had been dancing, and in my way even choreographing, since early childhood, but not knowing what I was actually doing...certainly not knowing that such a thing in fact had a place in the real world.  It was just something peculiar that I did for myself.  I recognized instantly who I was at that performance and pursued a life in dance immediately.”
- Lar Lubovitch

Lar Lubovitch founded the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company 43 years ago. In the years since, he has choreographed more than 100 dances for his New York-based company, which has performed in nearly all 50 American states as well as in more than 30 foreign countries. Born in Chicago, Lar Lubovitch was educated at the University of Iowa and the Juilliard School in New York. His teachers at Juilliard included Antony Tudor, Jose Limon, Anna Sokolow and Martha Graham. He danced in numerous modern, ballet, jazz and ethnic companies before forming the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company in 1968. 
Lubovitch made his Broadway debut in 1987 with the musical staging for the Stephen Sondheim/ James Lapine musical, Into the Woods, for which he received a Tony Award nomination. In 1993 he choreographed the highly-praised dance sequences for the Broadway show The Red Shoes. The final ballet from that show joined the repertories of American Ballet Theatre and the National Ballet of Canada. For his work on that show, he received the1993-94 Astaire Award from the Theater Development Fund. In 1996 he created the musical staging (and two new dances) for the Tony-Award-winning Broadway revival of The King and I. Most recently he devised the musical staging for Walt Disney's stage version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Berlin. In 2004 he was honored with the Elan Award for his outstanding choreography. In addition to his work for stage, screen and television, Lubovitch has also made a significant contribution to the advancement of choreography in the field of ice-dancing.

He has created dances for Olympic gold medalists John Curry, Peggy Fleming and Dorothy Hamill and has choreographed a full-length ice-dancing version of The Sleeping Beauty, starring Olympic medalists Robin Cousins and Rosalynn Sumners. For French Olympic skating champions Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay, Lubovitch choreographed a television project based on The Planets by Gustav Holst; telecast by the A&E network in 1995, the program was nominated for an International Emmy Award, a CableACE Award and a Grammy Award. In 2007, to supplement the activities (creating, performing and teaching) of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, he founded the Chicago Dancing Company, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to present a wide variety of excellent dance and build dance audiences in his native Chicago. Initiated by Chicago-born Lubovitch (and our Chicago-based dancer Jay Franke), the Chicago Dancing Festival (CDF) was launched in cooperation with Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) and the City of Chicago.

In the words of his presenter:
"Lar Lubovitch's integrity as a choreographer resonates through all his work. He gives us passion, form and concept- often in startling order."
- Anna Kisselgoff

View Lar's Choreography Excerpts: Video Compilation 1
Video Compilation 2
Video Compilation 3
Video Compilation 4

Lar through the years: