Gemze de Lappe

[Mme. Hermine]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/obituaries/gemze-de-lappe-95-dies-keeper-of-the-agnes-de-mille-flame.html

 

Quote

 

Gemze de Lappe, a dancer who performed on Broadway and, as a disciple of the choreographer Agnes de Mille, became an expert at restaging her choreography in musicals like “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” around the United States, died on Nov. 11 at a rehabilitation facility near her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

Her son Peter Carisi-de Lappe said the cause was pneumonia.

“She was the potter’s clay for Agnes and one of her foremost interpreters,” Anderson Ferrell, director of the de Mille Working Group, which licenses performances of de Mille’s dances, said in a telephone interview. “Gemze was her muse.”

 

 

[sandik]

Alongside her work with de Mille, de Lappe began her dancing life with Duncan technique, and continued to teach and coach those roles.  I had the good fortune to watch her work with that repertory in the 1990s, and it was truly special.