Tornado From Trinidad

The trumpets blared, the drums picked up the pulse-bumping, syncopated calypso beat, and the towering man in the red silk pants pranced out on the stage, his great eyes wide, his mouth an elongated O of wonder, his arms moving in ritualistic, angular figurations. The music seemed to course through the long, flexible arc of his brown body like water through a garden hose; occasionally a soft cry broke through his half-open lips. Thus 6 ft.-6 in. Geoffrey Holder--at 26 a solo dancer of the Metropolitan Opera, successful painter, actor, singer and choreographer--last week made his debut as director-star of his own calypso show, and introduced slightly dazed Brooklyn audiences to his sinewy, fiercely virile dance style.

Dancer Holder credits the birth of his fast-moving career to his Negro father, a "salesman with brains" in Port of Spain, Trinidad, who said, "If you put the tools in front of the baby, the baby will walk up to the tools." One day daddy Holder went out and blew the rent money on a piano. Pretty soon Geoffrey's older brother, Boscoe, began to bang at the keyboard in the evenings, and Geoffrey copied him. When Boscoe developed a taste for painting and then for dancing, Geoffrey copied him again. Endowed with natural rhythm and a body as hard and flat as a cricket bat, Geoffrey left school in his early teens to join a native Trinidad dance group that brother Boscoe had put together. By the time Boscoe departed for a dancing career in London, 19-year-old Geoffrey had picked up enough choreography and designing to take over the company.

Pro-Snob. Holder put on three rowdy revues, and they got him an invitation to 1952's Caribbean Festival in Puerto Rico. From the festival (where he was a great hit in "a purple suit amid a riot of bougainvillaea and frangipani") he jumped to the U.S., spent a hungry year in Manhattan before he "qualified before the gods and goddesses of the dance" at Jacob's Pillow, near Lee, Mass., and landed a role in the Broadway musical House of Flowers. He promptly wooed a featured dancer in the show, Carmen de Lavallade ("I thought she was a snob, and I liked that; I like to go after them; I don't like them to go after me").

When wife Carmen, who was a solo dancer for the Metropolitan Opera ballet, became pregnant, Holder filled in for her, shook the house to its staid foundations when he appeared in a white bikini in

Aida. Geoffrey, Carmen and their ten-week-old son now live in a Manhattan apartment with a fancy piano (mother-of-pearl inlay) and a large plaster statue of the Virgin. There Geoffrey sits up at night (he often sleeps only three hours) turning out ardently colored canvases, for which he gets from $200 to $450.

Anti-Hollywood. Although an enterprising publicity agent has stuck him with the label the Calypso King, Holder would like to forget commercial calypso as soon as his show closes next month after playing Philadelphia and Washington. Sitting last week in his dressing room, cluttered with the paintings he works on between shows, he tapped his shaven skull with nervous, spatulate fingers and speculated about what he would do next. In the fall he will present a concert show on Broadway starring himself and his wife and including no calypso at all. "Dancing," he says in his soft West Indian voice, "is something I have to do." He intends to continue choreography, perhaps attempt to compose to some U.S. jazz music. "But first I will have to knock all the Hollywood and Broadway out of the dancers' heads; in the United States only the pelvis is sexy; that will have to go."

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