Celebrate Me Home is a clever and enticing title for COCA’s 2008 Fall Fundraiser featuring Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater company members this weekend. But in actuality, the star of the show never truly left.
While Antonio Douthit regularly performs on stages around the world to international acclaim, he keeps close tabs on COCA, his artistic foundation.
Douthit has even managed to enable a cycle of education and opportunity between the St. Louis arts center and the elite in professional dance.
“He comes back about every year either to perform on a smaller scale, set choreography on students or teach master classes or workshops,” said Amy Sheerer, director of CocaDance.
“He has a true appreciation and a commitment to educate and inspire the next professional dancer that’s coming out of COCA.”
Before Douthit arrived n as the New York Times heralded n with Ailey, he was a precocious teenager with an innate ability to evoke emotion through movement who caught the eye of Lee Nolting.
“He had flexibility, presence, energy and a passion n you can’t teach that passion,” Nolting said. “He was one of those who, every time you see them move, they have this commitment. When you watch him perform you have to see that it comes from some place deep inside.”
Nolting drove Douthit from North St. Louis to Chesterfield for ballet classes. It was the first time the youth had left his neighborhood. In a few short years he would take his first plane ride to audition for the Juilliard School in New York.
Now Douthit is trying to create similar success stories for current COCA students. “To have the alumni come back and explain the work ethic, passion and drive that is required is really invaluable,” Sheerer said. “Students are going to be inspired by the opportunities that a life in the arts can really give to somebody.”
He comes home on a regular basis, paying forward the wisdom and life lessons stemming from his experiences abroad to students ranging from 4th grade to pre-professional.
“His humility and understanding of the importance of his role of inspiring the next generation shows how his character has developed in the past 10 or so years that I’ve known him,” Sheerer said.
The same stage that led Douthit to his journey as a professional dancer now becomes the venue where he will make his debut as artistic director in Celebrate Me Home.
“It’s been stressful, but its been a good stress,” Douthit said. “It’s going to be amazing, and I’m so excited to get it going.”
A group of Alvin Ailey dancers will travel with Douthit to his hometown to present original choreography and a solo performance by Douthit, as originally performed by Alvin Ailey. Ten ballets, including a 15-minute ballet by Matthew Rushing based on the film Across the Universe, which features the music of The Beatles. Denise Thimes also is featured on vocals.
BFF Graf
Celebrate Me Home includes the newest member of the COCA faculty Alicia J. Graf n Douthit’s close friend and former fellow company member at Alvin Ailey n who is just beginning her career as an arts educator.
“It’s so great to see her enjoying what she is doing after her concert dance career ended,” Douthit said. “We both talked about moving to St. Louis running our own dance studio. No one could have written or made up anything like this. The best word to describe it would be ‘ironic.’”
Graf joined the COCA family in early September and is already making a major impact on the students. In true BFF (best friend forever) fashion, she gives Douthit credit for being a source of inspiration to her new students.
“There are a lot of talented kids who now have Antonio to look up to because he comes home all of the time,” Graf said. “I feel like I’m not doing it alone. He really carries so much on his shoulders n not only for COCA, but for black men, and he does it with such grace.”
And so the circle of dance at COCA continues this weekend.
“His commitment makes everybody understand that if you go and you make it, that you have to comeback,” Nolting said. “Because there was somebody before you that did that n this is really what the circle is.”
Celebrate Me Home Fall Fundraiser will take place 6 p.m. Sat., Nov. 22. The Sunday show will take place at 2 p.m. on Nov. 23. Both shows will be performed at COCA, 524 Trinity Ave. Visit www.cocastl.org.
