Porter Inherits Family Dance Tradition From Nicholas Brothers.

When her father picked her up at the Pittsburgh Airport last summer, Lauren Porter wasn't expecting a big fanfare. She was visiting her parents on the way back to San Francisco, after touring Poland with Alonzo King's Lines Contemporary Ballet. The tour had gone well--the company won multiple standing ovations and favorable reviews in the press--which was some consolation after her application for a Princess Grace Foundation fellowship hadn't gone as she'd hoped. Porter, who'd been hired as a full company member just one year earlier, following her apprenticeship, had finished her application video in the middle of the company's spring season, while she was injured and trying to cover for another dancer. She'd been tired and stressed.

At her parents' home, Porter found a bouquet of roses and a card lying on her bed. She expected it would be a welcome back from her trip, or kudos for having tried so hard. Instead, it was congratulations: She had bested forty other applicants and won a dance fellowship that would pay her salary at Lines for the next year. She was one of over a dozen young artists (American Ballet Theatre principal Ethan Stiefel among them) to receive the honor that year. King had considered her a natural candidate. "She's a phenomenal dancer with a powerful command of technique and a bright young mind" he said. "She's also extraordinarily musical. She has everything you need: body, mind, and spirit."

Porter hadn't been so confident. As she recalled, her first reaction was utter disbelief. "I pushed my dad," she said. "I was like, `No way!'"

Porter was instructed to keep the victory under wraps, so that the Princess Grace Foundation could officially announce the winners at an October awards ceremony held in New York. Only her family and King, who had nominated her, knew she'd won. Porter, in turn, didn't know that her famous great uncles, tap-dance duo the Nicholas Brothers, would present her award onstage.

The ceremony was both a formal and a family affair, preceded by cocktail parties and followed by a post-show patty where Porter and the Nicholas Brothers had their picture, s taken with Prince Albert of Monaco, and the diminutive Fayard Nicholas waltzed his six-foot-tall niece around the dance floor as the orchestra played. The brothers introduced Porter to the audience with family anecdotes, and teased her onstage as she retrieved her award. "I was so proud of her," said Fayard Nicholas later. "She looked so beautiful in her gown when she came out to accept."

"It was just as much of an honor having them present it," said Porter fondly, "because they're incredible." At 86 and 72, respectively, Fayard and Harold Nicholas are still tapping ("not like I used to," admitted Fayard). In their heyday, however, the Nicholas Brothers were a "flash act"--their acrobatic tap style dazzled with moves like no-handed split jumps to the floor. They performed extensively in the '30s and '40s at the Cotton Club, on Broadway, and in more than fifty films. In the landmark tribute to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Stormy Weather, they performed their signature splits down a staircase as jazz great Cab Calloway revved up the band. Like Porter, they were even Balanchine dancers, after a fashion-they performed in Babes in Arms, a Broadway musical which Balanchine choreographed.

Talent clearly runs in the family, if not through the same genre. "They've tried to teach me tap, without much success," said Porter ruefully. But their show-business savvy has shaped her career nonetheless. "Fayard loves to talk," she said. "Any advice I get comes from his stories." Among the stories the Nicholas Brothers shared with the Princess Grace Foundation audience were their memories of Porter's dance career, which they had followed since she was a child. Fayard Nicholas recalled the time he made a cameo appearance in the San Diego Ballet's version of The Nutcracker, playing tapdancing grandfather to Porter's Clara. Then there was the time he and Porter broke into a spontaneous duet in a movie lobby after he took her to see Fantasia; the crowd waiting for the next screening gave them a round of applause.

Her talent and his stories didn't fully prepare Porter for King's unorthodox ballet style. Porter, a graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts, had moved around a lot as a kid, and absorbed several techniques. She met King as a ten-year-old, when she came to San Francisco to study and King offered her private lessons--even as a child, King says, Porter had "a keen focus and a steely will." After studying with the Bolshoi Ballet at Vail, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the School of American Ballet (where she plunged into Balanchine technique), Porter returned to San Francisco, to visit relatives and to take King's summer intensive. After three years with the company, however, Porter is still adjusting to King's ballets, which are contemporary rather than classical. "Physically, they're more demanding," she said. King throws out phrases that dancers are expected to pick up quickly, and allows room for improvisation within the dances. Testing her artistry has been daunting and rewarding all at once. "You get all this freedom, and it's frightening," she said. "It's like your personality's on the line." She doesn't count, relying instead mostly on visual cues and a rhythm she works out in her head--King favors polyrhythmic scores from artists like tabla master Zakir Hussein and jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, which he often adds after he has set the piece.

To qualify for the fellowship, Porter danced parts from two King pieces, Who Dressed You Like a Foreigner? and Shostakovitch #15. She was also required to submit a statement about her professional aspirations. She considers Lines home, she said, but she wouldn't pass up chances to dance abroad and learn a foreign language, or to exercise her classical training in a company that welcomes tall dancers, such as Pacific Northwest Ballet. King hopes to watch her artistic progress. And Fayard Nicholas hasn't given up on her tap training, but if the lessons don't take, he seems willing to forgive her. "She's so sweet," he said. "I'm just crazy about her."