Pearl Lang

Pearl Lang (May 29, 1921 – February 24, 2009) was an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher born Pearl Lack in Chicago, Illinois. She is recognized for her work as an interpreter and propagator of Martha Graham's choreographic style, and for leading her own company, the Pearl Lang Dance Theater, for which she choreographed sixty-three works.

Lang began dance training as a child in Chicago, studying under Frances Allis, whose technique shared notable similarities with Graham's approach to modern dance. Allis taught both movement for actors and her own modern dance method, and Lang performed with Allis's company in Chicago before relocating to New York. She also studied acting at the Goodman Theatre. In 1938, at seventeen, she enrolled in a program for gifted students at the University of Chicago, remaining there until 1941, the year she moved to New York and adopted the stage name Pearl Lang. In New York she studied with Martha Graham and Louis Horst, subsequently joining the Martha Graham Dance Company as a soloist from 1942 to 1952, and continuing as a guest artist from 1954 through the late 1970s. She was the first woman to perform Graham's own roles in seven works from the Graham repertoire, doing so intermittently over thirty years. Her original cast credits with the Graham company include Deaths and Entrances, Punch and the Judy, Land Be Bright, Imagined Wing, Diversion of Angels, Canticle for Innocent Comedians, Ardent Song, Dark Meadow, Night Journey, Eye of Anguish, and Appalachian Spring (1944).

Concurrent with her work in modern dance, Lang appeared in several Broadway productions between 1943 and 1951. She was a featured dancer in Carousel, which ran from 1945 to 1947, as well as in Finian's Rainbow and Peer Gynt. Her additional Broadway credits include One Touch of Venus and Touch and Go.

In 1952, Lang founded the Pearl Lang Dance Theater and began a parallel career as a choreographer. Thirty-six of the sixty-three works she created for the company drew on Jewish themes. Her choreographic output extended to film, opera, and television, and her works were performed by the Dutch National Ballet, the Boston Ballet, and the Batsheva Dance Company of Israel. In 1970, she invited Alvin Ailey and his company to share a three-story building at 229 East 59th Street in Manhattan, where the two companies co-directed the American Dance Center as a joint school. The Pearl Lang Dance Theater's final New York season took place at the Danny Kaye Playhouse in 2001.

As a teacher, Lang held faculty positions at the Juilliard School of Music from 1952 to 1969, Yale University from 1954 to 1968, Connecticut College and the Neighborhood Playhouse from 1963 to 1968, and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance until shortly before her death. Among her students were singer Madonna and choreographer Pina Bausch. The Juilliard School awarded her an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts on May 19, 1995. In 1997 she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by the International Committee for the Dance Library of Israel, and in 2001 she received the Lifetime Distinguished Teaching award at the American Dance Festival.

Lang received two Guggenheim Fellowships for Choreography, the Martha Graham Award for Performance and Choreography, the Workmen's Circle Award for her contribution to Jewish culture through dance, the Achievement Award from the Artists and Writers for Peace in the Middle East, the Achievement Award from the Congress for Jewish Culture, the Cultural Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Queens College Award for Excellence in Jewish Art.

Lang lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband, actor Joseph Wiseman, to whom she had been married since 1964. She died of a heart attack on February 24, 2009, at the age of 87, while recuperating from hip surgery. Wiseman died less than eight months later, on October 19 of the same year.