TRANSITIONS.

Lucia Dlugoszewski, a composer and longtime collaborator with choreographer Erick Hawkins, died April 11, 2000, of natural causes in New York City. She was 68.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Dlugoszewski moved to New York City, where she studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition with Edgar Varese, a well-known avant-gardist, in the early 1950s.

Hawkins, meanwhile, had severed connections with the Martha Graham Dance Company by 1951 and begun to develop his own approach to movement. He was passionately committed to the use of live as opposed to pre-recorded music and looked upon it as an independent structure that should be created in the same span of time that the dance itself was being designed. He asked Grete Sultan if she knew a composer who would work with him. She recommended a pupil of hers--Dlugoszewski--who was living on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

As a composer Dlugoszewski was passionately interested in timbre, the quality of any sound that makes one instrument clearly different from all others on the same pitch. Hawkins was equally interested in the distinctiveness of each individual dancer's movements. They had a natural sympathy and respect for each other's artistic aims and collaborated from their first project, openings of the (eye), in 1957 until 1994, the year of his death, when he choreographed his final work, Last Love Duet.

During the course of her four-decade collaboration with Hawkins, Dlugoszewski designed nearly a hundred percussive instruments to produce the exact quality of sound required for his dances. She also favored unorthodox approaches to the piano, sometimes reaching inside to pluck and strum its strings.

She was strongly influenced by the Eastern tradition of music and produced a series of atmospheric scores that enhanced the unstressed flow of movement, which Hawkins had evolved as his personal dance vocabulary. At times, she was seated onstage with an array of instruments as was customary in Eastern dance, a visible as well as an aural presence in the performance. With marriage, their personal lives were even more closely entwined. Two years after he died, she became the artistic director of the company. In addition to staging two of his dances posthumously, she choreographed two of her own that perfectly reflected the style and aesthetic of the company that had evolved during their collaboration.

In 1975, Pierre Boulez commissioned Abyss and Caress and performed it with the New York Philharmonic. Other commissions came from the Lincoln Center Chamber Society and the American Composers Orchestra. She was the first woman to win the Koussevitsky International Recording Award for her 1977 orchestral work, Fire Fragile Flight. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her scores have been praised as "wondrous transparent music in which she throws convention to the winds."

--Don McDonagh

Dr. Richard E. LeBlond Jr., former president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco Ballet, died peacefully at his farm in Sebastopol, California, on November 28 at the age of 76.

During his twelve-year tenure with the ballet, LeBlond brought the company from the brink of bankruptcy to its present robust status. Current President Arthur Jacobus called him "a role model for administrators." He consolidated the company's endowment fund, recruited an activist board of trustees and spearheaded the $13 million campaign to underwrite the San Francisco Ballet Association Building, the first of its kind, elevating the status of the company on a global level.

LeBlond, who died of transitional cell carcinoma, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1990. He founded the first AIDS outreach ministry at his parish, St. Philip the Apostle in Sonoma County, working as actively in this organization as he had in the arts throughout his life.

Born in Cincinnati, Richard Emmett LeBlond Jr. received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan. He taught at Temple University in Philadelphia and at Rider University in New Jersey, where he was the chair of the department. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the careers of musicians. While teaching, he joined the boards of the Association of American Dance Companies and the Pennsylvania Ballet, but later left the world of academia to serve as president and general manager of the Pennsylvania Ballet.

LeBlond came to the San Francisco Ballet as president in 1975; thereafter, he worked to elevate the administration to the professional level of its artists. This continued on as the artistic directorship of the ballet changed hands from Lew Christensen to retiring New York City Ballet principal dancer Helgi Tomasson, which created a controversy in ballet circles as Christensen's protege and heir apparent, Michael Smuin, had not been selected by the board. LeBlond wrote a book, From Chaos to Fragility, about his turbulent experiences during this time.

LeBlond was one of the founding members of the California Confederacy for the Arts and served on the dance panels of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Western Dance Alliance and the Bay Area Dance Coalition. He also served on the board of DanceUSA, where he was an acquaintance of Margaret Jenkins. "He was nondiscriminatory in every sense of the word. He didn't see any boundaries between the different kinds of dance; his love of the performing arts was total," Jenkins said. "He also had a global relationship to the community, which evolved out of his sociology background. He was a good citizen and mentor of the arts. Many have followed his lead and used him as an example."

A tribute to LeBlond was held February 26 at San Francisco's Herbst Theater with a reception at the San Francisco Ballet Association building, whose offices and studios he helped to build through his skillful administration. The San Francisco Ballet, the Margaret Jenkins Company, the men's choral group Chanticleer and the Lamplighters musical theater company all performed on his behalf.

LeBlond is survived by his companion of many years, Larry D. Campbell, four children and two grandchildren.

--Heidi Landgraf