Washington, Lula

Impact on the world

Co-founded the Lula Washington Dance Theatre with her husband Erwin in 1980 to provide creative and training opportunities for minority dance artists in South Los Angeles, after UCLA's dance program initially rejected her application at age 22 for being supposedly too old to begin a dance career, a decision she successfully appealed; the company has since toured more than 150 U.S. cities and internationally across Germany, Spain, China, and Russia, and Washington has personally received choreography credits on the films 'Avatar' and Disney's 'The Little Mermaid.'

Life & background

Born in the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts, California, the oldest of eight children raised in poverty, Washington worked nights at hamburger stands, a skating rink, and a movie theater just to afford school clothes, with no exposure to formal dance until a nursing-program teacher at Harbor Community College brought her class to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater perform at UCLA; the experience so moved her that she abandoned nursing for dance. After UCLA's dance program rejected her initial application, deeming her too old at 22, she appealed the decision and was admitted, going on to earn both a bachelor's and a Master of Fine Arts in dance while performing in the Academy Awards telecast and alongside performers including Cher, Al Green, and Barbra Streisand; she also founded UCLA's Black Dance Association to bring more artists of color onto campus. In 1980 she and her husband Erwin, a journalist and playwright who became the company's executive director, founded what was first called the Los Angeles Contemporary Dance Theatre, later renamed the Lula Washington Dance Theatre, building a multiracial company of roughly a dozen professional dancers whose choreography has addressed homelessness, police brutality, the civil rights movement, and the Underground Railroad. The company purchased and renovated a 12,600-square-foot building on Crenshaw Boulevard in 1988 as a permanent community cultural center, rebuilt it after the 1994 Northridge earthquake with FEMA's largest gift in the organization's history, and continues operating a school whose motto, 'I Do Dance, Not Drugs,' reflects its founding mission; Washington's own choreography credits include the films 'Avatar' and 'The Little Mermaid,' and her daughter, Tamica Washington-Miller, now serves as the company's associate director, continuing the family's leadership into a second generation.

Sources

1. Lula Washington Dance Theatre official website; Kennedy Center artist page; Cultural Treasures of South LA; My Ordered Steps