Mr. Martin was a student at Jefferson High in South Central LA in the late 1940’s when he and high school friend Alvin Ailey took a bus to the Lester Horton Dance Theater on Melrose Boulevard in Hollywood to watch another high school friend, Carmen De Lavallade, take class. It was a moment that would change his life. Mr Martin began training with Lester Horton and together with Alvin Ailey joined Horton’s groundbreaking LA company, one of the first racially integrated modern dance companies in the US.

After Lester Horton’s sudden death in 1953, the dancers of LHDT collectively ran the theater and the school that was attached to the company until 1956, when de Lavallade and Ailey moved to New York. Martin helped run LHDT until the theater closed in 1960. Martin moved to New York to teach Alvin Ailey’s newly formed company; Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, where Don Martin was in the original cast of Ailey’s signature piece, Revelations.

Martin took part in a three-month tour of 15 countries with AAADT, as cultural ambassadors of John F. Kennedy’s “President’s Special International Program for Cultural Presentations”.

Taking a break from dance, (as he had done previously when he joined the army for two years) Martin became head buyer for “Mr Guy” of Beverly Hills. He travelled the world and dressed many Hollywood stars. He stayed connected to dance, teaching in the evenings and weekends keeping the Horton technique alive in Los Angeles. In 1996 Horton’s partner, Frank Eng, and Martin catalogued and archived all of Lester Horton’s works and housed them safely at the Library of Congress. When Frank Eng died Martin became the keeper of the Horton legacy. In 2003 he was presented with The Lifetime Achievement Award by the The Dance Resource of Greater Los Angeles for preserving the Horton Technique and Legacy.

It was during this time that Martin was invited to teach at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where he passed on to his students his passion for the essential and original ideals of Lester Horton. Known to all of his students respectively as “Mr. Martin”, his technique classes and choreography were famously rigorous, demanding and uncompromising. He created four original works on the LACHSA dancers, “Still I Rise,” “La Casa de Las Secas,” “Odes and Homages,” and finally “Joan of Orleans.” It was an honor for a LACHSA dance dept. student to be included in the cast of his challenging works. He also restaged Horton’s powerful duet “Dedication to Jose Clemente Orozco” twice for Lachsa dancers. It was originally created at LHDT for Carmen De Lavallade and Jack Dodd and then was danced again by Ailey and De Lavallade.

Mr. Martin continued his work cataloguing and archiving Horton’s legacy until his death last week. Now the torch has been passed down to Martin’s dancing daughter and LACHSA alumni, Natasha Diamond Walker, a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company who plans to reinstate the Lester Horton Dance Theater here in Los Angeles.

The LACHSA Dance Department honors the memory of this incredibly impactful teacher. It is the intention of the dance dept. to pay tribute to Mr. Martin in the coming year and a scholarship in his name is being established.