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Steps of Survival
Choreographer Richard Daniels has a new lease on life
By Susan Josephs
In 1994, during the last weeks of his partner's life, Richard Daniels returned to his first love. Though he spent most hours caring for his boyfriend in a hospital room, Daniels, at the invitation of a dance teacher, took breaks to attend her classes. Dance ''gave me a focus,'' he recalls. ''It allowed me some moments away from grief.''
Now 50, Daniels has a flourishing career as a choreographer and solo performer who regards dance as both a way ''to indulge my fantasies and as part of my wellness program.'' When his partner of more than 16 years became ill with AIDS, Daniels discovered that he too, was HIV positive. Perhaps for that reason, he primarily views his choreography as a kind of tikkun olam, or healing of the world, ''because Jewishness, like being gay and HIV positive, is part of my fiber. My pieces aren't biblical or historical but my point of view and sensibility have elements of Jewishness,'' he says.
As part of the 92nd Street Y's Harkness Dance Center's ''Jewish Voices Series,'' Daniels will perform excerpts from three works this Sunday that stem from deeply personal experience and reflection and derive from a movement style concerned with stillness, musicality and emotion. While one dance, called ''Novelette,'' has been described as a ''day in the life'' kind of solo, ''Bonus Round'' explores how loss leads to rebirth over the course of a lifetime. Featuring original music by Paula Kimper and poetry by Aaron Shurin, the dance reflects Daniels's belief that ''inherent in the idea of surviving is loss which brings up certain ironies. I'm having success now in my life but the person who would appreciate that best isn't around,'' he says.
Daniels, however, pays tribute to other important people in his life with ''Thirteen Anniversaries.'' Set to Leonard Bernstein's ''Anniversary'' compositions, Daniels has created short dances as gifts to present to those who played a role in his artistic development, beginning with his childhood piano teacher.
Reviewers have described Daniels's choreography as poignant, intense and focused. They frequently note how both his age and HIV status render his work all the more inspirational. For Daniels, the positive responses to his art confirm his belief that ''limitation can be the model of invention. Aging is just one more limitation,'' he says.
Over a sandwich at a Chelsea coffee house, the bespectacled, contemplative, soft-spoken Daniels recalls his childhood in Kansas City, where he yearned to dance but felt that ''was unacceptable for a nice, Jewish boy. Also, no one in my family was an artist,'' he says of growing up as a second generation American with a father in the fabric business.
Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Daniels found artistic outlets through piano, which he began studying at the age of six, and photography. When he entered the Pratt Institute to study photography, he took his first modern dance class with Valentina Litvinoff, ''who was this crazy woman that got me to feel and move,'' he says.
After graduating from college, Daniels moved back to Kansas City, worked in photography and studied ballet as a way to keep in shape. In class, he met the man who would become his long-term boyfriend. Together, they relocated to New York to pursue careers as dancers. His partner ultimately became a lawyer. And though he found sporadic work in various dance companies, Daniels decided by the age of 30 that he ''wanted to make a living'' and entered a decade-long career in arts management. ''I thought it would be a way to combine my different interests,'' he says. ''But it was not completely satisfying. There was a void.''
When Daniels returned to dance in 1994, he first asked choreographers, including Molissa Fenley and Zvi Gotheiner, if they would create dances for him. Gradually, he began creating his own solos, which proved just as therapeutic as his massages, Chinese acupuncture treatments, herbal supplements and his HIV cocktail regimen. ''So many of my generation is gone,'' he says. ''I want to stay visible. Dance can't just be the exuberance of youth.''
For the most part, Daniels can ignore the voices in his head that tell him he was insane for taking up dance in his 40s. ''I was so self-censored for so long,'' he says. ''When someone you love dies, there's a freedom that comes, a need to say things now.''
Two weeks before his death, Daniels's partner, an African-American man, converted to Judaism. ''We knew we couldn't be in a Jewish cemetery together and talked of our ashes being dumped in the Nile,'' Daniels recalls. ''My father found out about that and said that all of us should be together.''
Daniels's boyfriend embraced the notion that he should convert and studied Judaism for a year. ''He's the only black man in a Jewish cemetery in Kansas City,'' says Daniels, who wryly notes that his mother should have been proud that he ultimately married a Jewish lawyer. ''It's quite a special thing.''
As for the future, Daniels intends to choreograph and dance as long as he can. As his friend Zvi Gotheiner told him, ''the older you get, the more stories you have to tell.''
Richard Daniels presents works-in-progress at the 92nd Street Y's Harkness Dance Center's ''Sundays at Three'' Jewish Voices series on Sunday, Nov. 4, 3 p.m. at 1395 Lexington Ave., Manhattan. Tickets are $10 and reservations are recommended. 212-415-5553.
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