THE MORNING LINE DATE: Friday, January 13, 2017 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh Lana Picciano PAGES: 9, including this page

Boneau/Bryan-Brown will be closed on Monday, January 16 in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We will reopen on Tuesday, January 17.

January 13, 2017

Martha Swope, 88, Who Etched Dance and Theater History in

Photographs, Dies

By Sylviane Gold

Martha Swope, whose crisp, compelling photographs of dancers and actors at work recorded nearly half a

century of stage history, died on Thursday in New York. She was 88.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said Jeanne Fuchs, her longtime friend and executor.

From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of “West Side Story,” to 1994,

when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands

of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of

“La Cage Aux Folles” in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever.

Those photographs made their way into newspapers (the arts pages of The New York Times frequently featured

her work), magazines and books. They decorated sales brochures, posters and programs.

And they eventually garnered her a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater in 2004 and a lifetime achievement

award from the League of Professional Theater Women in 2007.

As official photographer first for New York City Ballet and then for an honor roll of other dance troupes, Ms.

Swope chronicled the working lives of George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Mr. Robbins and other key figures

in 20th-century dance. At the same time, she was what Variety called “the go-to photog” for New York’s

theater industry, documenting more than 800 productions.

Whether Ms. Swope was posing clients in her studio or capturing their live performances, whether on

assignment for a publication, a dance company or a theater producer, her stated aim was to make a

straightforward record of the artistry before her lens.

“I’m not interested in what’s going on on my side of the camera,” she told an interviewer. “I’m interested in

what’s happening on the other side.”

She took ballet lovers into the studio with Mr. Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky as they worked with the dancers

on “Agon.” She was backstage as Mr. Baryshnikov and Liza Minnelli prepared their television special. And she

brought Irene Worth and Kevin Spacey squabbling in “Lost in Yonkers,” Gwen Verdon and Chita

Rivera vamping in “Chicago” and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton canoodling in “Private Lives” to those

who couldn’t buy tickets.

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Ms. Swope never revealed her age, even to intimates, who laugh about how often they tried unsuccessfully to

find out, looking for her passport in a purse left briefly unattended on a trip, or searching her apartment for clues

while feeding her cats.

Martha Joan Swope was, in fact, born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Tyler, Tex. It was Washington’s Birthday, and, Ms.

Swope told friends, her parents, John Swope and the former Nellie Clark, named her for Martha Washington.

Even as a girl, she carried a little camera wherever she went. But her real passion was dance.

After a year at Baylor University in Waco, she was accepted at City Ballet’s training affiliate, the School of

American Ballet. She left Texas to pursue a dance career — setting out, she recalled, with 17 hats and “visions

of going to cocktail parties and meeting all those West Pointers.”

Instead she met Mr. Robbins, who had returned to ballet class to get into shape for directing and choreographing

“West Side Story.” An amateur photographer, he offered his fellow shutterbug the use of his darkroom, and

then, when rehearsals began, he invited her to bring her camera.

One of her pictures appeared in Life magazine, and her photography career took off.

“I didn’t even know what an interchangeable lens was, or a Leica,” she once recalled. But she was still hoping

to become a dancer when Lincoln Kirstein, who ran the school and was general director of City Ballet, pulled

her out of class one day to offer her a job recording the company’s work in pictures. She shelved her toe shoes.

Her routine was to attend rehearsals to become familiar with the choreography. She would then shoot the dress

rehearsals for each cast, typically arranging her lanky frame in ballet’s fourth position, leaning back on her rear

leg and switching between wide-angle and close-up lenses.

Sometimes — but only if she had to — she loaded a third camera with color film. She also took pictures, as

unobtrusively as possible, at performances. Such sessions could yield as many as 300 negatives of a single

work. But those that left her darkroom were the ones in which every toe, every fingertip was properly

positioned, and dance and dancers looked flawless.

Delia Peters, a friend who danced with City Ballet, said in an interview: “Having been a dancer, she understood

the timing. She understood what they were going to do, she understood where the pictures were going to be.”

Ms. Swope’s career began as technical advances and evolving tastes changed the way dance and theater

performances could be photographed. Previously, slow shutter and film speeds had made it impractical to shoot

dancers and actors unless they were prettily posed and carefully lighted in a studio.

Ms. Swope was able to catch them animated and sweaty and laboring onstage or in rehearsal. But she also

pioneered the now commonplace practice of distilling the essence of a drama or musical by posing the

performers tellingly and shooting them in close-up.

By 1978, she was photographing 60 to 70 percent of the Broadway roster, working out of the apartment below

her own on West 72nd Street and using the bathroom as the darkroom.

Actors and producers valued not just her canny eye and instinct for flattery but also her ability to work swiftly

and calmly. With her gentle temperament and Southern manners, Ms. Swope managed to get cranky, tired

actors to do what she wanted without seeming bossy.

Back then, publicity photographs were printed from negatives one at a time for hand delivery to newspapers and

magazines. Ms. Swope and her assistants regularly worked through the night preparing them for distribution the

next morning.

“She was an incredible teacher,” said Carol Rosegg, one of several dance and theater photographers who

learned their craft assisting Ms. Swope and then became her competition. “And she was a master retoucher. In

those days you would sit with a single-edge razor blade scratching out wrinkles one at a time.”

In 1980, Ms. Swope moved her studio to a large storefront space in the Midtown complex Manhattan Plaza,

taking an apartment there as well. By the time she retired and gave away her cameras, the studio contained more

than a million images, which she sold to Time and Life Pictures.

But the deal ended in acrimony and litigation, and she regained possession of her archive in an out-of-court

settlement in 2002. In 2010 she donated her life’s work — contact sheets, negatives, prints, slides and digital

files — to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. A selection of her photos

was exhibited at the library for four months beginning in the fall of 2012.

She is survived by two nieces, a nephew and a great-niece.

Ms. Swope’s legacy was important to her, and she was determined not to separate her dance and theater images.

She had hoped to compile a volume surveying them together, but she never found a taker. The closest she came

to marrying her two worlds in one book was “Baryshnikov on Broadway: Photographs,” which documented the

dancer’s acclaimed 1980 television special.

Other books for which she provided photographs include Tanaquil Le Clercq’s “Mourka: The Autobiography of

a Cat,” Kenneth Laws’s “Physics and the Art of Dance” and Denny Martin Flinn’s “What They Did for Love:

The Untold Story Behind the Making of ‘A Chorus Line.’”

Her friends remember an enthusiastic, card-playing traveler who loved animals and jigsaw puzzles. But Ms.

Swope’s photographs will outlive those memories. They are in dozens of other dance and theater books, and

they regularly pop up in web searches for graying Broadway actors or bygone ballet stars. They also reappear as

her subjects die or when a reference to show business history needs to be illustrated. Only last month, a

dramatic Martha Swope photograph appeared in The Times with an article about the 35th anniversary of

“Dreamgirls.”

January 13, 2017

Review: ‘Latin Standards,’ When Dad Was Larger Than Life

By Charles Isherwood

The vibrant performer Marga Gomez pays loving, funny tribute to her father, a comic performer and songwriter

named Willy Chevalier (the Chevalier was a bit of invention), in her latest solo show, “Latin Standards,” being

presented through Sunday as part of the Under the Radar festival.

Ms. Gomez, her hair slicked back and wearing a flashy gold jacket — her father was a natty dresser, too —

begins by announcing that this will be her final performance. It manifestly isn’t, of course, but as she notes in

the short warm-up comic set that precedes the meat of the show, “I’m not Mexican but I’m close enough for the

sweep.” (She also makes a funny crack about Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s not realizing that “theater is

gay.”)

Her father was a popular entertainer in the nightclubs that catered to New York’s large Latino population in the

1950s and ’60s, who had come to the city “from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico — all of them

looking for a better life raping, drug dealing, committing crime,” Ms. Gomez quips, adding a wry, “Nyet!”

With the aid of slides projected onto a large screen looming above her, Ms. Gomez draws an engrossing portrait

of her father and his work. He appeared with Celia Cruz and Tito Puente and, intriguingly, the first transgender

celebrity, Christine Jorgensen.

Ms. Gomez had a warm relationship with her father, although he had previously had two other wives, and

children by them. Ms. Gomez’s mother was an entertainer, too — in photos, she’s the dictionary picture of a

blond bombshell — who sometimes worked with her father and at other times fought with him or ignored him.

The show’s title refers to the songs that Mr. Chevalier wrote, many of which were recorded and made the Latin

charts, and most of which were soulful laments about the trials of love. Ms. Gomez confesses that she’s no

singer, but she recites the lyrics as recordings play in the background.

But while his career burned hot for many years, tough times occasionally intervened, and Ms. Gomez weaves

into the story of his decline a tale of one of her own professional setbacks. She decided to start a comedy night

at a Latino drag club in San Francisco, despite the reservations of her girlfriend then, whom she calls Gwyneth,

“because she was into fashion and whiteness, I mean wellness.”

“What about your brand, Marga?” Gwyneth says scoldingly, noting the club’s seediness. But Ms. Gomez

persevered, and though she had to buy the chairs herself, she gradually gained a following and the grudging

admiration of the club’s owner. But the year was 2012, and the forces of gentrification were already swallowing

up sections of the largely Latino Mission District. The club closed.

The toggling between the stories of her father’s career and her own can sometimes be abrupt, but she uses her

father’s songs as transitional material. Still, under the brisk direction of David Schweizer, the show’s

momentum never flags, even when Ms. Gomez makes the occasional standup-style diversion, as when she talks

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about attending an Adele concert and only paying attention during the patter because, fundamentally, she

doesn’t like music.

Ms. Gomez’s natural instincts as a performer are comic, but here she occasionally allows herself to wade into

real feeling, as she recalls with some regret that she withdrew from her father as she concentrated on her career.

“I was afraid to see him old and wrecked from booze, cigarettes and cocaine,” she says. “I was scared to see

him poor. Now I’m the age he was when he died and I can see he was beautiful always, with all his mistakes.”

And as “Latin Standards” underscores with winning heart and humor, Ms. Gomez clearly owes her own love of

performing, and her ability to plow over the speed bumps that are inevitable in show business, to her father,

who took it all in stride and kept striving. Sometimes Willy had to take a restaurant job to make money, but

even then he was planning for his next comeback. When business at the restaurant was slow, he’d fill the down

time writing jokes and songs on the checks. That’s a trouper.

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