Vol. 80/No. 3 January 25, 2016
Frank Boehm, 65, was supporter of SWP
Like many of his generation, Boehm participated in the movement against the Vietnam War, when he was a student at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Convinced Washington’s war was an extension of the ruling capitalist families’ drive for profit and imperialist domination, he joined the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, in the late 1960s.
In 1969 members of the YSA in DeKalb were assaulted by thugs from an ultrarightist group calling itself the Legion of Justice. Men wearing ski masks and armed with tire irons and mace raided the apartment that served as the YSA headquarters and beat the Young Socialists there. Boehm and other YSAers worked with the SWP branch in Chicago, which had been attacked by the same outfit, as had other groups, including the Black Panther Party and the Guild Bookstore, to mount a broadly supported and successful defense campaign to push them back.
Boehm joined the Socialist Workers Party and moved to New York in the early 1970s. He served in the national office of the YSA, taking on central leadership responsibilities in a period of rapid growth for the revolutionary group. He served as New York City party organizer and was active for a period in the Oakland-Berkeley branch.
Boehm resigned his membership in the party in the mid-1970s to pursue a career in dance. He performed ballet and jazz dance and became a choreographer, dance teacher and producer.
Boehm and his companion, Hanna Takashige, traveled to Cuba in the early 1980s to begin collaboration with famed Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso on a film about her life and the National Ballet of Cuba.
Alonso’s ballet company was closed down in the 1950s under the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. It was reborn in 1959 with the full support of the new revolutionary government. It became recognized as one of the best ballet companies in the world, and, in the spirit of the revolution, one that took ballet into factories, schools, hospitals and town squares, in the countryside and city, as well as in theaters.
“Frank wanted to show the role of dance in the Cuban Revolution,” Takashige told the Militant. “To show how ballet should not be some rarified thing only for the enjoyment of people able to pay a lot of money.”
Boehm and a team he recruited filmed dockworkers drumming and dancing, dances organized by soldiers and people in all walks of life. There are scenes of a project of Alonso’s to bring ballet to people with disabilities, including a dance class with blind children.
Due in part to difficulties presented by the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, the film was never completed. Recently, Takashige said, Boehm hoped the opening of relations between Cuba and the U.S. meant he would be able to finish it.
Boehm remained a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, celebrating the victory winning the release a year ago of the final three of the Cuban Five imprisoned in U.S. jails. He continued to support the Socialist Workers Party, following the Militant closely, reading Pathfinder books and contributing financially to the party.
Betsey Stone contributed to this article.
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