Obit Page
In memory of B.C.
She wheeled into the coffee shop, pulled up next to me, and pushed a piece of paper my way. “Take a look,” she said.
It was a single typed page with her full name, Helena Bascomb Johnson, at the top which was not, of course, how any of us knew her.
You usually did what Nina wanted. So rather than greet her, I began to read.
Helena Bascomb Johnson, lead dancer and choreographer for the Danceteria Mobius ballet company, who first set foot on stage at age 37, died on September 22nd in her apartment in New York City.
The cause of death was a heart attack, her son Eric Johnson said.
After 20 years as a single mother and chef, Ms. Johnson, who had long choreographed dance routines in the privacy of her living room, convinced Ursula von Bethe, director of Danceteria Mobius, to watch her perform. “The rest,“ Ms. von Bethe later remarked, “is dance history.”
“I saw all my routines in a dream in 1982," Ms. Johnson said in a 1991 interview with Interview magazine. "It just took me another decade to bring them into this world.” Those routines became her Moodscapes, which she performed every spring on the Danceteria’s main stage on Prince Street.
Ms. Johnson was born Helena Bascomb in Claremont, California, on August 27, 1946. Her mother, Margaret Désiree Scott, an early female aviator, barnstormed the West in a biplane. Ms. Johnson directed her two sisters in neighborhood dance and tap performances during an otherwise uneventful childhood. She attended Pomona College where she won a women's junior tennis championship in 1965.
She married Charles Johnson, a trombonist, in 1979. The marriage lasted only two years. Ms. Johnson subsequently supported her son and herself as the sole proprietor and chef of The Cuban Missile Crisis, a Caribbean restaurant she opened on Lafayette Street. She shut the restaurant's doors when she began to dance. "From the age of three, all I ever dreamed of was being a dancer," she told the New York Times in 2005. "When it happened, nothing else mattered."
She is survived by a sister, Emma Bascomb Rodriguez of San Antonio, Texas, and by her son Eric.
I pushed it back to her.
