Remembering Larry White.

Martha Graham Dance Company dancer Miki Orihara still uses the incense holder Larry White gave her years ago when she first joined the company. "He took an interest not just in my dancing but in my Japanese heritage. We would talk about Buddhism and life. He was genuinely interested in people and deeply spiritual," Orihara says. White's generous spirit was reflected throughout his life's work as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. Raised in East Moline, IL, he graduated from college in 1969 and began dancing in Minneapolis in 1970. He joined the Graham company in 1980 and was a principal dancer from 1984 to 1987, performing the roles of The Minotaur in Errand into the Maze, The Shaman in The Rite of Spring, and The Revivalist in Appalachian Spring. White also danced with Pearl Lang, Paul Sanasardo, Peter Sparling, and Manuel Alum and choreographed work for his own companies, Larry White and Friends and MOVINGStill. Myra Woodruff, a fellow Graham dancer and current chair of the dance division at Southern Methodist University, where White last taught, remembered him as a teacher. "There was no finer role model for student artists. Larry celebrated with delight his student's discoveries and shared his accumulated knowledge from a long career generously with them, guided by the idea that if he didn't share what he had learned it didn't live. He was an example of integrity--intelligent, wise, yet innocent. He was a gentle hungry soul interested in humankind in all its varieties." Larry White succumbed to cancer in September.