May O’Donnell, an early Martha Graham principal dancer and a modern-dance choreographer and teacher, has died in her Manhattan home at age 97.
Her Feb. 1 death was reported by Marian Horosko, who is writing a book about her.
The serene Ms. O’Donnell might have served as the model for the tranquil, all-seeing Pioneer Woman in Graham’s 1944 “Appalachian Spring,” a role she created. Yet she had a robust sense of humor about the world of dance, and she was the rare dancer who stood up to the strong-willed Graham with quiet determination.
Ms. O’Donnell choreographed a modern-dance classic, 1943’s “Suspension,” which was inspired by her memory of seeing a plane below the hilltop on which she was standing in wartime California. That work was best explained, she felt, by T.S. Eliot’s observation in “Four Quartets” that dance was “at the still point of the turning world.”
In the piece, dancers moved slowly amid boxes and a large turning mobile, seeming at times to float. “Suspension” confounded audiences accustomed to the highly charged narrative dances that were popular then.
“O’Donnell created a poetical cloud of movement that refused to be hurried,” Donald McDonagh wrote in his Complete Guide to Modern Dance. “The work didn’t thunder, shout or roar its message; it whispered but eventually achieved recognition.”
Ms. O’Donnell was born in Sacramento and later would recall the heady openness and freedom of California, which also had affected the young Graham. In California, Ms. O’Donnell trained with Estelle Reed and Michio Ito before studying in New York with Graham. She performed with Graham from 1932-38, then returned to California and founded the San Francisco Dance Theater with her husband, composer Ray Green, and a Graham colleague and lifelong friend, Gertrude Shurr.
Ms. O’Donnell toured with Jose Limon from 1940-42. She returned to Graham’s company in 1944, dancing as a guest artist for nine years. During that time she created the major roles of the Attendant in Graham’s “Herodiade” (1944), She of the Earth in “Dark Meadow” (1946) and the Chorus in “Cave of the Heart” (1946). She also danced principal roles in “Letter to the World,” “Deaths and Entrances,” “Every Soul Is a Circus” and “Primitive Mysteries.” She retired from the stage in 1961.
Ms. O’Donnell choreographed from 1937-88, presenting her first program of her own work in 1939. In 1949 she founded a New York-based company that performed into the 1980s. In 2002 she received the Martha Hill Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her repertory of 50 documented dances included many collaborations with Green, who died in 1997.
Ms. O’Donnell also was an influential teacher. Her students included Gerald Arpino, Cora Cahan, Robert Joffrey, Ben Vereen and Dudley Williams. Vereen recalled her mystique in a 1983 interview in The New York Times.
“May was very gentle, even then, and her classes had such an easy flow,” he said. “Complete journeys in themselves. I always wanted to get closer to her. But I was very shy.” She taught only once a week, he said, adding: “I’d think in between, `Where does she go?’ She’d bring in this wonderful, warm love and then disappear.”
