Kevin Wynn, choreographer of Complex Movement, dies at the age of 67
Kevin Wynn, a choreographer of complex maelstroms moving at lightning speed and an unusually dedicated teacher who influenced generations of dancers, died Oct. 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 67.
His mother and only immediate survivor, Edith Wynn, said the cause was a heart attack.
Before becoming a choreographer and teacher, Mr. Wynn was a dancer. In the early 1980s he was a soloist with the José Limón Dance Company and Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion.
“He was one of the most brilliant, magnificent dance figures I have ever seen,” Ms. McIntyre said in an interview. “He had a lushness that reached all sides of the space, and at the same time the ability to render all the small articulated details. He could give you the delicacy of a feather and the roar of fire. You could hear his body talking to you.”
These qualities were equally evident in Mr.’s choreography. Wynn. Review of one of the first performances of his company, the Kevin Wynn Collection, in 1983, Jack Anderson wrote in The New York Times that “the energy of Mr. Wynn’s dancers could have raised the roof.”
Review of a 1996 performance, Jennifer Dunning, also writes in The Timessaid Mr. Wynn was “both an architect and a choreographer,” with a “highly developed, impressive sense of craft and full-stage patterns.”
“There is,” Ms. Dunning added, “a breathtaking formal beauty in the way the dancers seamlessly cluster and spread and in Mr. Wynn’s combination of forms.”
But Mr.’s greatest impact Wynn served as a teacher and mentor, primarily at the Conservatory of Dance at Purchase College in Westchester County, where he taught for more than thirty years.
“He made you feel chosen,” says Colleen Thomas, the choreographer and chair of the dance department at Barnard College, who joined Mr. Wynn studied at Purchase and later performed with his company.
Many of Mr. Wynn’s students called him “Papa Bear,” and he had a nickname for most of them. His lessons, for which he developed a clear pedagogical sequence influenced by Mr. Limón and Katherine Dunham, were extremely challenging, and he didn’t let anyone get away with saying they were tired. When someone fell, he laughed.
“He had a wonderfully healthy way of teasing kids so that they didn’t take themselves so seriously, but they took the work seriously,” says Carol Walker, former dean of dance at Purchase.
Mr. Wynn’s interactions with his students were not limited to the classroom. “Most teachers made appointments in their offices,” Ms. Walker said, “but Kevin was in public. He sat in the alcoves we call the cubbies, and everyone was welcome to sit and chat.”
Those conversations continued for decades, as his former students became dancers in major companies and productions, and some became important choreographers and teachers themselves.
Jason Rodriguez, before he was a major figure in fashion and appeared in “Pose,” the FX drama series about New York City’s prom culture, studied with Mr. Wynn and was his assistant for a short time. “My entire career was built because of him,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was the first person to give me a yes. He showed me that the relationship between teacher and student could be human and caring.”
Kyle Abraham, a choreographer who won a MacArthur grant, remembers seeing Mr. Wynn as a prospective Purchase student in 1996. “The complex layered movement dialogue was more than a movement language,” he recalled on Instagram after Mr. Wynn’s death. Wynn. “It was a rainforest, a bustling metropolis, it was fantasy and nightmare. Ultimately, it was the freedom to dream and create a world the way I would like to see it.”
“After I saw that work, I felt like, ‘This is where I want to be,’” Mr. Abraham said by phone. “Like many students, I snuck out of my classroom early so I could watch Kevin’s combinations. The environment he set up was family-like, and you wanted to be part of it because it looked like the cool kids.
Mr. Abraham’s regular conversations with Mr. Wynn, in person and by telephone, began that summer and continued until just before Mr. Wynn’s death.
“If you’ve seen my work, you’ve seen Kevin’s impact and imprint on my voice,” Mr. Abraham wrote on Instagram. “To me, Kevin was to dancing what Prince was to music.”
Kevin Antony Wynn was born on May 6, 1956 in Washington. His mother, a dental hygienist, and his father, Horace Wynn, divorced not long after his birth.
Mr. Wynn graduated from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in his hometown and then enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts as a theater major. There he met a dance teacher who changed his life, as he would later change the lives of so many.
Seeing “this 6-foot-4, 200-pound black man moving like a feather,” Mr. Wynn told The Tampa Bay Times in 1997, caused him to “change gears.” Feeling that he started his training as a dancer late and needed to catch up quickly, he transferred to Purchase’s dance conservatory.
After graduating in 1979, Mr. Wynn joined the Limón company, where he became a soloist and remained for four years.
“I loved it, but it helped me realize that dancing wasn’t going to be the most important thing,” he told The Tampa Bay Times. “I had to do something else, which was choreographing.”
After teaching for two years in Italy, Mr. Wynn began his tenure at Purchase in 1986. He also taught at Dance Space and the Peridance Center and Steps on Broadway, and was on the faculty of the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. program. His company performed in New York at the Joyce Theater, the Harkness Dance Festival and Danspace Project, among others, but disbanded around 2005. He then choreographed primarily for the dance departments at Purchase and other colleges.
“He just wasn’t interested in playing the game and doing the PR,” said Ms Thomas of Barnard College. “He wanted to teach and he wanted to make his work.”
Ms. Thomas sometimes asked Mr. Wynn about his busy, multi-layered dancing. “He would say, ‘This is what my world is like,’” she said. “I think this is what his brain was like. He found order and beauty in a quick mess.”