NEW YORK — Carmen de Lavallade, the exquisite dancer who broke barriers throughout the arts during her six-decade performing career, has died. She was 94.

De Lavallade died following a short illness, her son, Leo Holder, told the New York Times.

From her start at a Los Angeles high school in the 1940s to her one-woman show in the 2010s, de Lavallade’s smooth, unmatched grace and striking figure made her one of the nation’s premiere dancing talents.

“Dance is close to music and poetry. It’s ephemeral. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you can feel it,” she told Ebony magazine in 2012. “Dance is also universal. You can take it any place and people will understand it, because it’s a language everyone speaks.”

She appeared on Broadway, in Hollywood films and on TV, alongside many of the most talented people in each medium — Agnes de Mille, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker and her husband of 59 years, Geoffrey Holder, to name a few. Holder died in 2019 at 84 years old.

Other than her union with Holder, perhaps her most enduring partnership was with Alvin Ailey, the dancer and choreographer who founded his own storied dance company in New York. She was actually the first one to notice Ailey’s talent and convinced him to sneak away from the school gymnastics team to dance.

“I just thought he should be a dancer,” she told the Daily News in 2019. “In those days a guy wouldn’t dare do a thing like that, they would be ostracized. So he used to sneak off with me to my dance class at Lester Horton’s. He didn’t tell anybody.”

De Lavallade began her career at a time when Black entertainers faced many hurdles — she was one of the first Black prima ballerinas at the Metropolitan Opera — but her desire and talent allowed her to create a storied career.

“I, unbeknown to myself, became fearless about going into territory I knew nothing about,” she told the Boston Globe in 2014.

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