A Time to Celebrate Change : Bella Lewitzky Will Dissolve Her Dance Troupe, but First She Plans to Commemorate Her Career in ‘96-97 Season

“Not bad--to keep a modern dance company going for 30 years. Not bad . . . .”

In an announcement marking the end of an era in California dance, a smiling 79-year-old Bella Lewitzky stood in a room packed with civic leaders and arts professionals on Monday, describing plans for a two-year celebration of her career during the 1996-97 season--a celebration that will end with her disbanding her company by June, 1997, to pursue other projects.

Held at Frank Lloyd Wright’s imposing Freeman House in the Hollywood foothills, the Lewitzky reception attracted everyone from former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to dancers and dance educators greeting the bottom line of Lewitzky’s decision with mixed feelings.

“It was quite disturbing to me,” said veteran choreographer Rudy Perez. “She’s been a mainstay here for so many years--a beacon, someone to look up to. It’s hard for me to believe.”

“I was shocked,” said Lynn Dally of the Jazz Tap Ensemble. “When something is this beautiful, you want it to last forever. But the thing I love about Bella is that she understands change.”

“Bella has always had an incredible sense of style and timing,” said Pat Finot, professor of dance at Cal State Long Beach. “This is another example.”

“On one hand, I was surprised and saddened,” said former City Councilman Mike Woo. “Somehow I had assumed that Bella would go on indefinitely. But I was also happy about the legacy she has created for dance in L.A.”

In a separate interview, Lewitzky spoke of that legacy--and the cost of sustaining it. “This 30-year-old company is my third, not my first,” she said. “So I have really been at this from about 1951. And as I approached 80, I thought, ‘This is the time to do things that you haven’t been able to do, things that are driven by a different kind of need. Something new around the corner.’

“I didn’t plan it this way,” she said. “The 80th just did something to me. ‘Here I am turning 80,’ I thought. ‘What am I doing? Am I still learning? Am I still exploring? No, I’m not: I’m repeating. That becomes not worth doing.’ ”

In particular, Lewitzky said she had come to feel creatively stifled by the corporate company structure that defines nearly all professional arts organizations in this country. “I’m really doing service and duty to the organization, not the art,” she explained. “And I think that everybody (in the arts) can say that.

“Every time you build an institution, the institution begins to be the thing you serve. I found that I had lost the ability to make independent choices. I thought, ‘Gee, at 80 I ought to be able to decide when I want to choreograph, how long it will take me to choreograph, with whom I will choreograph and where I do it.’ But I can’t, and that’s crazy.”

Lewitzky described working within an American arts corporation as a process of “constant compromise” and spoke of “looking for a new organizational shape that won’t do that. I’ve talked to very eager young dancers who say they don’t want to be in the kind of institution that’s struggling all the time to gather boards, to find money, just to survive. But there are no other answers: You still have to pay somebody.”

She also talked with enthusiasm and more than a little envy about some of the companies she had helped bring to Los Angeles when producing the dance component of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival--companies that benefit from more generous and stable European systems of arts support.

“Those companies are still experimenting,” she said. “They’re still developing, seeking new paths. You have the luxury of doing that only if you are not driven to outdo yourself, to succeed--and in two weeks. That’s a ridiculous objective and something has to give. Something always gives.”

In this sense, Lewitzky said that she views her decision to disband her company and walk away from the whole conventional American art-making structure as “a political act, there’s no question about it.”

“I did not predict that we were going to see the National Endowment for the Arts go under with this unholy contract that the Republicans said they have,” she said. “That’s a coincidence, but it makes my decision even more correct for me.”

At one time, Lewitzky considered an alternative to closing shop: taking a less active role in the running of her company and letting either her daughter, Nora Reynolds, or Susan Rose become the company’s resident choreographer. However, she said that this idea proved “unacceptable to the major (funding) powers-that-be. The New York grant-givers had never heard of them, and the fact that there was a continuum between them and me didn’t enter into the equation.” She declined to name the grant-giving individuals or foundations involved.

Throughout the interview, the idea of continuum loomed large in her comments. “I have been taught by wonderful people, and there’s no need for me to take their teachings to the grave,” she said. “The only immortality I really believe in is the continuum between people, and at this point I feel I need to transfer what was handed to me.”

Explaining her involvement in elementary school arts education, Lewitzky emphasized that “art teaches how to learn like no other subject around. And it’s done through creativity and participation by the child. In the years that I have taught, my interest has always been in elementary schools and, in particular, the third grade. The window of learning opportunity is most open there.”

But she has no intention of abandoning concert dance, she said, or of forgetting the local dance community’s need for a facility offering “an underwritten right to fail.” Speaking to her guests on Monday night, she called the abandoned Dance Gallery project on Bunker Hill “a failed, beautiful idea which I haven’t given up on,” but mostly described her future plans in philosophical terms:

“Basically I’m going to put forward questions that have no answers and try to answer them,” she said. “But in my own time.”

* The Lewitzky Dance Company appears Friday and Saturday at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex on the campus of Cal State L.A. Tickets: $12-$22. (213) 466-1767.

* The company also will be the subject of “Life & Times” on KCET-TV Channel 28 Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The program repeats at midnight and again Sunday at 10:30 a.m.