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Linda Sohl-Donnell (Ellison) [biography]
Dates: 1953-
Birth Date: Apr 23, 1953
Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio
Linda Sohl-Donnell (Ellison), tap dancer, choreographer, and director, was born the second youngest of four children to Julia Nevetne and Kenneth Clayton Sohl She began ballet classes at age six at a local dance studio owned and run by Charlotte Teller. At the age of fourteen, eight years into her ballet training, Sohl encountered tap dance and was immediately drawn to the energetic rhythms and movements. By age sixteen, she was a dedicated dancer demonstrating steps and teaching in Teller's studio. It was not until she enrolled as a dance major at the University of Ohio in 1971 that she was exposed to jazz music and the culture surrounding tap dance. At the university, Sohl began teaching tap in the evenings, after her classes, at an old armory; she would eventually initiate tap into the dance department's curriculum, becoming the first candidate for an inter-arts disciplinary major.
In 1979, Sohl was a twenty-six-year-old modern dancer in the graduate dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) when she attended a performance of Tap II at UCLA's Royce Hall. It included Foster Johnson, Charles "Honi" Coles, Howard "Sandman" Sims, and the Nicholas Brothers. She went backstage and met Johnson, who had been living and teaching in Los Angeles, and thus began private lessons with the master who would expose her to jazz-tap rhythms and techniques, as well as the culture of the music that was intertwined within that dance form. It was her first lessons with Johnson, in the recreation room of the Oakwood Apartments where he lived, that she would commit herself fully to tap dance. During that same period, she had begun to build an eclectic duet repertoire of movement pieces with Toni Relin which included modern dance, rhythmic explorations, and political dance-theatre works. They presented their first full concert at The House in Santa Monica in 1981, in which Sohl performed Foster Johnson's tap "Acappella" solo. Later that year, Sohl presented her first tap choreography: a pair of duets performed with Karol Lee that included Breezin' and Overtime, which combined tap dance and contact improvisation. In 1982, Sohl and Relin named the company LTD/Unlimited, for its repertoire of modern, rhythmic, and theatrical movement works. While she was lauded as a tap soloist, the unlimited possibilities of her imagination lay in composition and choreography. In The Essence of Rhythm in 1983, a three-night tap extravaganza produced with her designer husband Cecil Donnell, Sohl-Donnell presented her first large-group choreography, Tap Rhapsody/Part I, a suite of short contrasting works for five women dancers to live music composed by Steve Fowler for bass and flute. When, in 1984, LTD/Unlimited co-director Toni Relin went on to other pursuits, Sohl-Donnell became the sole artistic director of the company, which in 1988 would be called Rhapsody In Taps (RIT). Through the eighties, for her company of almost all-women, Sohl-Donnell choreographed such tap works as Goin' Home (1984), Seven Steps to Heaven (1985), Dark Eyes (1986), and Duet (1987). She also created such tap/modern dance fusion works as Four/Four on the Swing Shift (1984), Stickato (1985), and Live Wire (1985).
Despite her modern/tap fusion choreographies, Sohl-Donnell was duly cognizant of the (black) rhythm tap tradition from whence she came. After the great rhythm dancer Eddie Brown had relocated to Los Angeles in 1982, Sohl-Donnell and her RIT dancers studied with him. Brown became the guest soloist with Rhapsody In Taps, as would Honi Coles, Sandman Sims, and Jimmy Slyde. The Essence of Rhythm concert Sohl-Donnell produced in 1986 had guest artists Brown, Coles, Sims, Leonard Reed, Steve Condos, Francis Nealy, along with her original LTD/Unlimited company of women.
With Piru-Bole, which premiered at the Japan American Theatre in Los Angeles in1989, Sohl-Donnell underwent her most challenging choreography working from a score. A playful duet for her and percussionist Mark Berres, the work used a set of twenty-two chromatically tuned Indian tabla drums, with changeable pitches and volumes, set in a semi-circle. Berres played the percussive score by John Bergamo (originally for Indian tabla, Chinese bowls, vocal chants, and taps). The two began by reciting musical syllables in intricate Indian rhythms; then Sohl-Donnell duplicated Berres' rhythms beat for beat, accent for accent, with her taps. Piru-Bole represented a major artistic breakthrough.
Sohl-Donnell has been awarded four Choreographer's Fellowships from the NEA, a Monticello Fellowship from the National Association for Regional Ballet, and a Brody Fellowship from the California Community Foundation for her choreography. Since 1978 she has been on the dance faculty at Orange Coast College and has toured throughout the US, Asia, France and Germany teaching and performing.
When asked to describe her own choreography in relation to music, she replied, "I work in two different areas. I do use traditional jazz music for some pieces and I manipulate it so there's spatial traveling and patterns and quite a bit of its presentational and forward facing movement, but then I have made lots of dances where I have consciously chosen to use music outside of the jazz tradition."
In 2004 Sohl married long-time collaborator and percussionist Monty Ellison, thus catapulting her modern tap choreography into a multitude of rhythmic directions.
[Source: Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (2010)]