Donald McKayle now. (News).

"Donnie gets dancers to do things you'd never think they could do," says Director Dennis Nahat during a break between rehearsals recently at Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley. "It's almost like learning a whole new technique." In "A Tribute to Donald McKayle" this month, the thirty-nine-member company will survey McKayle's work over a forty-year span. The fare includes Death and Eros (2000) and the classic District Storyville (1962), both in their company premieres, and House of Tears, created in 1992 for what was then San Jose Cleveland Ballet.

Now a spry 72 and one of the first 100 Irreplaceable National Dance Treasures named by the Library of Congress, McKayle entered the dance scene in the late 1940s when theatrical, humanistic dance was flourishing. He was the son of Jamaican immigrants and a self-taught teenage performer. He was taken to a Pearl Primus concert at New York's High School of Central Needle Trades by a friend who studied with her. "The curtain opened, and there was this woman," he recalled after rehearsal in January, at the company's rambling, downtown San Jose studios. "It was like seeing a piece of African sculpture come alive."

That experience soon led McKayle to the concert stage. Despite his lack of training, he attended a New Dance Group audition in 1946 and was invited to join the school on scholarship. By 1948 he was performing and choreographing with Primus, Sophie Maslow, Jane Dudley, Bill Bales, and Anna Sokolow. He appeared in Three Dances for Lenin, Four-Four Time, Harmonica Breakdown, and Folksay. He launched his own company, the Contemporary Dance Group, in 1951, then four years later received a scholarship to the Graham school and joined the company in 1955 for one year.

On this day in San Jose, McKayle quietly polishes the sizzling "An Entertainment" scene from District Storyville. Dalia Rawson, cast in the role of the Shimmy Queen, preens and wiggles on a platform as a bevy of slick young men stands at her feet. Meanwhile, McKayle vocalizes the nonstop syncopated beats with Indian-style scat, bringing the mass of rhythms into clearer focus. Occasionally he rises from his chair to show the group the right amount of hip check or a tricky counter-rhythm between the spine and leg. "It took four days for you to get loose and lascivious," he reminds the often frustrated dancers.

Nahat agrees. "It takes a few days for them to loosen up and get their joints working properly. But Donnie jumps right in and gives them the movements, then reshapes and rechoreographs them so they fit the dancers. It becomes a whole new work, fresh, alive. It's not ballet, and there's little pointe, but it's earthy, spiritual, and of the people. It adds dimension to the company."

Like Alvin Ailey and Talley Beatty, McKayle challenged the style and taste of concert hall dance in the post-war period, injecting it with dance hall vernacular, jazz rhythms, and everyday social scenes relevant to the lives of ordinary people, as District Storyville amply displays. McKayle says he has always known what he wanted to do and, without fanfare, did it. When Doris Humphrey pressed classical music on him as the proper music for his dances, he persevered with Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet.

A distinctive but muted political thread runs through McKayle's career onstage--with its persecuted, outcast, but ever-hopeful subjects--as well as off. As a young man he was invited to become a member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts alongside such artists as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Harry Belafonte, lobbying to give blacks a voice in the society. In 1959, he teamed with Jean Erdman to form the first interracial company on the American concert stage.

McKayle currently holds an endowed chair at the University of California, Irvine, where he is the Claire Trevor Professor of Dance. His autobiography, Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life, was published in 2002 by Routledge Harwood, London. As for being named an irreplaceable treasure he says, "I think it's lovely. It's not only people that receive it. It's the hula and Jacob's Pillow."