A half century with Agnes: Gemze de Lappe's long career in the theater has been founded on the work of Agnes de Mille.

For more than fifty years, Gemze de Lappe -- as dancer, actress, and director -- has been closely associated with Agnes de Mille. De Lappe was her protegee during the 1940s and 1950s, and even now she regularly crosses the country, restaging the de Mille ballet and musical theater repertory. One could say that she began preparing for work under so demanding a professional as de Mille at age eight, when she began to study ballet with Michel Fokine. Further study with Irma Duncan and experience with Isadora Duncan's style followed. Her career as a dancer was also helped by her petite but surprisingly strong and beautifully shaped body, her arresting and expressive face, and -- probably most important -- her personal intensity that matched de Mille's own.

"Agnes liked to work with people who could think," de Lappe says. "She liked the way I moved. I was a strong dancer, and I could act. I could watch her do something and then I could make it work." In the 1979 PBS special, "Musical Comedy Tonight," de Mille chose her to perform Laurey in her Dream Ballet from Oklahoma! -- some thirty-six years after de Lappe had joined a touring company of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. "She was the best then," de Mille said of the choice. "She is the best now -- because Gemze brought to the commercial theater tenderness and passion."

In the 1943 tour of Oklahoma! de Lappe was the Child with Pigtails. Her previous experience had been with the Fokine Ballet, during summer stock performances produced by the Shuberts at Randall's Island in New York City. The Fokine dancers performed in a different musical each week -- Anything Goes, Of Thee I Sing, Roberta -- shows that had been hits on Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s. In between acts they would perform one of Fokine's one-act ballets -- Schiherazade, Les Sylphides, Prince Igor -- under the direction of Fokine's son, Vitale. During the day they rehearsed for the next week's show. De Lappe found the work "just heaven," and the twenty-five-dollar paycheck each week "helped out the family a lot" during the Great Depression,

A life in the theater was no certainty, however. Luck -- or maybe destiny -- settled the matter when de Lappe was attending Hunter College, tom between the conflicting requirements for graduation and a ballet career. She ran into Jerry Whyte, who had been dance captain for the Randall's Island shows and was now production manager for the Theatre Guild. "We met on Forty-fifth Street," she recalls. "He asked me, `Why aren't you at the audition?' `What audition?' I said. I wasn't even interested in Broadway shows -- I was a ballet dancer. So he sent me over to the Theatre Guild, the producers of Oklahoma! They liked me and they hired me." Her career as a professional dancer was launched.

Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on March 31, 1943. "It was a huge success, much to everybody's surprise," de Lappe says. "The national company went on tour in September; among other cities, we played Chicago for a year. We did nine shows a week, and it sold out for the entire run." In Chicago, the dancer who played the lead female dance role of Laurey left the show, and de Lappe, as understudy, stepped in. Chicago was followed by six months in California, and then, in 1947, a year and four months in London.

"London was still in very bad shape -- lots of bomb damage from World War II. There was still a hole in the roof of the Drury Lane Theatre, where we played -- gales often blew through the theater in the winter. Some nights they would need five or six men to hang on to the heavy opera house curtain during intermission so that they could change the scenery. Otherwise the curtain would blow out and the audience could see right onto the stage. The London audience came prepared. They would arrive with hot water bottles and blankets. It was sold out all the time, and we played nine shows a week there, too."

In 1951 de Lappe appeared in the original Broadway production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I for six months, playing King Simon of Legree in Jerome Robbins's ballet sequence, "The Small House of Uncle Thomas." A personal call from de Mille to audition for the female dance lead in Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon brought de Lappe into a closer working relationship with the choreographer.

"It was a wonderful part," she says. "I danced with Jim Mitchell, who had an acting part and was the leading male dancer. We were on Broadway for a year. There were many wonderful reviews, and I received the 1952 Donaldson Award that year for best female dancer. The Donaldson Award was like the Tonys are today -- your peers go to see the shows on their dark night, and they vote for best actress, best female dancer, and so on. It was the big award to get on Broadway."

The lead female dance role in Paint Your Wagon was the first of many roles that de Mille choreographed for her. De Lappe describes the process: "Before the full company came in, Trudi Rittman, who wrote the dance music, would be there, with Agnes, Jim, and me. Most of the dances she did for us were created early in the morning. Agnes would come in with sketches of dances and ideas. She always knew what she was going to say in her pieces. She would start choreographing and experimenting, and Trudi would sketch out some music. It was really great fun -- very relaxed, and you felt creative, stimulated, and interested. The next day Trudi would come back with a piece of music -- maybe only sixty-four bars, but fleshed out."

A collaborative relationship evolved in which de Lappe would transform de Mille's ideas into movement expression. As de Lappe explains, "Once Agnes started working with a soloist, she would identify her movement qualities and strengths, then she would push her farther in those directions. It was the physicality that I would work out." The excitement of the creative process was easy to imagine, as de Lappe laughingly remembers. "Sometimes with lifts Agnes would say, `Now I want you to have her up in the air, out there, just flying.' We'd start fooling around, and she would cry out, `Try that! Why can't she go up? Why can't she stay up there?'"

After Paint Your Wagon, de Lappe joined Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre), where she performed demi-caractere and dramatic roles in ballets choreographed by de Mille (The Harvest According, Fall River Legend), Robbins Fancy Free), and Antony Tudor (Judgment of Paris). De Mille continued to create leading roles for de Lappe. As their working relationship and friendship deepened, de Lappe became, in essence, the medium for de Mille's choreography -- even when the role was designated for another dancer. "She had four or five of us whom she was comfortable working with, and would choreograph the dances on us," de Lappe says. "I did a lot of ballets like that -- and some of them were not for me. I worked on a ballet she created for Erik Bruhn and Nora Kaye, all about a New York cocktail party. Agnes choreographed it on us and then we transferred it onto Nora and Erik. It was understood from the very beginning that that's what we were doing. By that time, whenever she needed someone to do certain kinds of work, she would ask me to come." This working arrangement served de Lappe especially well after she married John Carisi, a respected composer and trumpet player. She was able to stay close to New York City to raise her two sons.

Music was one of the artistic points of intersection between de Lappe and de Mille. De Lappe had studied violin and voice and was a member of the first graduating class of the High School of Music and Art in New York City. To her, de Mille's dances offered "interesting musical phrasing. I was continually impressed and intrigued by the way she used music."

She loved the musical challenge of de Mille's choreography. "Musically I could get it. A lot of people she worked with could get the basic beat, but they wouldn't quite get her phrasing. We danced big phrases with interesting counterpoints. She appreciated the fact that I could catch and retain her steps and rhythms as she improvised."

De Lappe toured with the Agnes de Mille Dance Theater during 1953 and 1954. Today she still expresses mixed feelings about that tour: "I had agreed to star in Agnes's concert company. That was unfortunate, because I really wanted to stay with Ballet Theatre, but I had given my word to Agnes, so there was no backing out."

Happily, rewarding professional opportunities continued to arise. In 1955 de Lappe performed with Shirley Jones in a European tour of Oklahoma! sponsored by the U.S. Army. The next year she was called to Hollywood by Twentieth Century-Fox to dance Robbins' King Simon of Legree in the film version of The King and I, starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. De Lappe laughs when asked to compare the choreographic process of de Mille and Robbins: "Jerry had a lot of ideas. He'd give you a step and change it -- he'd give you three versions of it inside a minute." She credits Robbins with pushing her into new dimensions of dramatic expression through an unnerving rehearsal experience. "He had me in the middle of the floor growling like a lion -- and at that time people in the dance world never opened their mouths and made any sounds. It was a great lesson after the absolutely galvanizing embarrassment that I felt when he asked me to do it, but once I did it I realized the validity of it."

De Lappe danced the lead role of Louise in de Mille's choreography for Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, which played City Center and then ran for a month at the American exhibition at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. A six-month State Department-sponsored tour in 1959-60 took de Lappe to Asia with the Dance Jubilee Company, performing "Americana choreographed by Rod Alexander," as she puts it. "We started in Greece and just worked our way across the map, all the way over to Hong Kong. We didn't stay in most places very long, but we were in India for two months."

Her husband played in the accompanying orchestra of five musicians, and wrote many of the arrangements. "They played jazz for the king of Thailand, who joined in because he liked to jam," de Lappe recalls. There was a brief but very artistically satisfying stint assisting Jack Cole in Kismet at Lincoln Center; more concert work in Dracula, choreographed by Katherine Litz (in which de Lappe played the ingenue who received the fateful bite); the role of the Countess in Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore, sponsored by the Library of Congress; and even straight acting parts here and there.

But it was the de Mille repertory that gave de Lappe her finest roles. The complexity and real-life struggles of the characters in a de Mille ballet afforded her the opportunity to explore the full range of her abilities as a dramatic dancer. When asked to name her favorite role, there was a brief pause before de Lappe responded, "It's a big toss-up between Lizzie Borden [Fall River Legend] and Miss Emily [A Rose for Miss Emily]." Both of these roles depict disturbed but passionate women whose lives have been thwarted by society or emotional deprivation, and who are each driven to commit murder as a result. Smiling as she relishes the intensity of the memories, de Lappe says, "Oh, it's like playing Hamlet -- you can really sink your teeth into a role like that."

As a guest star, de Lappe in 1971 performed A Rose for Miss Emily during ABT's thirtieth-anniversary season at New York's City Center, partnered by Marcos Paredes as the doomed hero. Saturday Review critic Walter Terry described the "rafter-shaking ovations" following their performance, and commented, "with an actress such as Gemze de Lappe as guest dancer, it, gave still further proof that ABT can provide the best acting to be found in ballet."

Thirteen years as artist in residence at Smith College, where she taught ballet, musical theater dance, and Isadora Duncan dance, honed de Lappe's teaching and coaching skills. An honorary doctorate from Niagara University in 1992 for her lifetime of achievement in dance rounded out a teaching career that has enriched countless students.

As it turned out, her retirement from Smith in 1992 as professor emeritus actually meant getting back to work -- onstage. Her skills as a teacher and director, combined with her firsthand knowledge of de Mille's best-loved ballets, are still much in demand by professional companies, community theaters, and college dance departments. Recently, for instance, she supervised initial dance rehearsals for Brigadoon at the North Carolina School of the Arts and re-created the choreography for the New York City Opera production at Lincoln Center. After six decades, Gemze de Lappe remains as busy as ever, and that suits her fine.