Marina Harss

Cornejo has a way of being in a group but not quite part of it, an island of intensity amid the tumult. And that quality of quiet absorption translates onto the stage, too; he can elevate an entire ballet with his focus and polished bravura. And yet he never gives the impression of wanting to steal the show. Precision, control and a soaring, exhilarating jump that leaves your heart in your throat — they all become something greater: the suggestion of a state of mind. Without the usual fanfare that attends stars, he has become one of the most admired male dancers of his generation.

“When I was 20,” he said, “it was all about the dancing, but now it’s about interpreting something onstage. The technique is there.”

This is Cornejo’s 20th season with American Ballet Theatre, and in honor of the occasion, Tharp, one of America’s greatest choreographers, has made a new ballet, “A Gathering of Ghosts,” set to Brahms’ lush second string quintet. In addition to premiering at the opening gala, it will be part of a special 20th-anniversary program, on Oct. 26.

The ballet revolves around him, almost as if he were conjuring the other characters. In one sequence, he illustrates the brilliance with which he shapes and colors movement: He stretches and retracts, allowing a ripple to undulate through his body, then initiates a series of turns, going faster, then slower, then faster again. He seems to respond to messages locked in the music, creating a character even when there is no actual story.

“I see him as a hero,” Tharp said during a rehearsal break, “something that’s out of vogue these days. And heroes are always, to a certain extent, alone.”

Tharp knows him well, having spotted him early on and given him a central role in her 2000 ballet “The Brahms-Haydn Variations” when he was still in the corps. “She was the first choreographer to choose me for a principal role simply because she thought I deserved it,” he said.

Though his talent was recognized at a very young age and his rise through the ranks was quick — he was promoted to soloist at 19, after just one year in the company, and to the top rank three years later — it took several more years for him to be assigned the roles he craved and felt he deserved. Those were the dashing romantic leads — princes, warriors, lotharios — who hold together the stories of the great classical ballets. At 5-foot-6, Cornejo is several inches shorter than the long-limbed standard for male dancers cast in these parts, and it took Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of Ballet Theatre, a while to see him in this light.

“He proved us all wrong,” McKenzie said, “just through his sheer sensibility in classical works and the dynamics of his dancing.” Once Cornejo had proved himself, the roles kept coming: Basilio in “Don Quixote” in 2005, Romeo in 2007, Siegfried in “Swan Lake” in 2013. At 38, he is still making role debuts: the love-struck Des Grieux in “Manon” this past spring, and now George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” which he will dance in New York for the first time at the evening planned in his honor.

Cornejo, who was born in the province of San Luis in central Argentina and grew up in Buenos Aires, started studying ballet at 8, following his older sister, Erica — they are two years apart — despite being painfully shy.

“He would watch class through the window,” she said from Boston where she recently retired from Boston Ballet, “and one day, my teacher at the time, Wasil Tupin, asked him into his office and offered him some candy. We don’t know what he said, but the next day Herman was in class, and he already knew how to turn and jump, just from watching.”

He picked up steps like a sponge. Another teacher from those early years, Katty Gallo, remembered him as “un chico geniecito,” a little genius, who could seemingly do anything asked of him.

In addition to private training, Herman and Erica both attended the Instituto Superior de Arte, the official ballet school of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, where they were in the same cohort as Marianela Nuñez and Luciana París. Their mother, Elsa, spent hours shepherding them from ballet classes to school and back. Their father, Ricardo, a career officer in the Argentine Air Force, took night shifts as a security guard to help pay for their training.

At 14, again following his sister, Cornejo joined Julio Bocca’s touring group Ballet Argentino. Still practically children, the Cornejos became professional dancers, touring for much of the year. Bocca remembers how impressed he was with the siblings, and especially Herman: “He was like a purebred foal,” Bocca said in a phone call from Uruguay, where he lives, “with all that energy but a refinement in his technique and in his approach extraordinary in someone so young.”

On Bocca’s recommendation, Herman Cornejo entered the International Ballet Competition in Moscow despite being only 16, below the official age of entry. He won the gold medal, the youngest dancer ever to do so. It was around that time that the Cornejos started making plans to audition for American Ballet Theatre, where Bocca was a principal dancer. In 1998, after performing a balleticized tango for a private function at the Metropolitan Opera House, they got their wish. (The Cornejos will reprise that tango in the Oct. 26 performance.) McKenzie offered them both spots in the studio company. Herman Cornejo was 17.

Since then, he has danced most of the classical repertory, as well as 20th-century works by Michel Fokine, Frederick Ashton — most memorably, Puck in “The Dream” — Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Mark Morris, and others. Ballet Theatre’s resident choreographer Alexei Ratmansky made striking parts for him in “Serenade After Plato’s Symposium” and “Seven Sonatas.”

Cornejo is remarkably adaptable and quick to pick up steps. “Herman always knows my choreography as well as his,” Misty Copeland, a frequent partner, said.

He says his versatility is related to his curiosity about movement: “I like to understand the challenges that lie within the styles of different choreographers,” he explained, “and to forget what my classical body wants to do.” His clean, unmannered technique — in part the product of his Argentine training, which combines various schools of ballet — helps too.

A turning point came in 2013, when he took a leave from the company to perform in an intimate dance-theater work, “Chéri,” based on Colette’s novel about an aging courtesan and her younger lover, by the choreographer Martha Clark. His partner was the much-loved ballerina Alessandra Ferri, then semiretired. (She has since regularly returned to the stage.) The two developed an intense stage chemistry; three years later Ferri asked him to partner her in “Romeo and Juliet” at Ballet Theatre, a role she hadn’t danced in seven years.

Working with Ferri propelled Cornejo to a level of stardom he hadn’t known before. He developed a more mature, simmering stage persona. Whereas before he had danced mostly alongside Xiomara Reyes, who retired in 2015, he now partnered a variety of ballerinas, including Maria Kochetkova and Copeland, who will dance the role of Terpsichore opposite his Apollo.

“To become a really good partner you need to dance with different people,” he said, “experience all kinds of bodies, legs, emotions. You have to build that chemistry.”

Though he remains at his peak as a dancer, the wear and tear of a career begun at 14 has started to take its toll. Dancing still feels good, he says, but the recovery the next day has gotten harder. In the last few years he has had a series of calf injuries that have kept him offstage for months at a time.

He takes better care of himself now, with a rigorous regimen of physical therapy, cross-training and nutrition. He recently got married, to an Argentine journalist, with whom he bought a town house in the Bronx. They are expecting their first child in January.

His ability to dazzle is undimmed. At a performance of “The Sleeping Beauty” last spring, in the role of the prince, he executed a highly technical solo requiring extreme precision but lacking the usual crowd-pleasing tricks. For much of it, he seemed to hover above the stage, barely touching the floor, while sustaining the ebb and flow of the music. He was, in every sense, the prince.

The applause started about halfway through in a slow crescendo and lingered for a long time afterward. “I felt that moment, and I don’t think I can do it better,” he said. “I don’t think about the future or how much time I have left. Just about that moment, that performance.”

This article originally appeared in

NEW YORK — “Yo, Herman,” Twyla Tharp calls out across a large, crowded studio. Rehearsal is about to begin, and dancers are milling around, chatting and stretching. But not Herman Cornejo. He’s in a corner, sketching out small movements as he runs through a sequence of steps in his mind. Seeing him lost in thought, Tharp walks over, placing a hand on his shoulder. The two confer quietly, like confidants.

Ballet Hero: Herman Cornejo's Milestone

That fusion of shape and musicality was the fruit of a long collaboration — the women had danced together for more than two decades. Until late last year, they created work at their home base at Nrityagram, a company and dance school near Bangalore in southern India. Sen was the choreographer, and Satpathy the star dancer and teacher.

But as she approached 40, Satpathy said recently, she felt a new desire — to test herself by carrying an evening on her own. She had “a strong urge to push into an untouched and underexplored dimension” of her artistry “before it was too late,” she said over tea in Brooklyn, where she was staying with friends.

Last year, when she turned 45, she told Sen that she would be taking some time away from Nrityagram to explore. She quit her position as director of the school and senior dancer in the company.

This new phase of discovery has brought her back to New York, where she will be performing an evening of solos at Drive East, a yearly festival of Indian classical music and dance. It is a rare opportunity to see one of the finest proponents of the classical Indian dance style Odissi. This dance form has existed since at least the 10th century in Odisha, a state on the eastern coast of India, where its harmonious poses are depicted on the walls of temples.

Satpathy was born in Odisha’s capital; like many girls in the area, she studied Odissi at the local dance academy, where she was the best in her class. But the idea of dedicating her life to dance didn’t cross her mind. She went to college and earned a degree in education, with plans to become a teacher. An audition for Nrityagram, which was then recruiting new dancers, got in the way.

“As soon as I walked into that place,” she told me, “I knew, this is what I want to do.” Despite family disapproval — “my parents didn’t speak to me for three years” — she persisted. Eventually, she became the head of the school, developing a rigorous conditioning program that includes elements of yoga, martial arts, exercises found in the Natya Shastra — a surprisingly detailed ancient Sanskrit treatise laying out the principles of the classical performing arts — and even some ballet and Pilates. This summer, she has been teaching conditioning workshops across the United States.

She was also the star of the dance ensemble, the finest proponent of Sen’s choreography besides Sen herself. “She’s easily among the top five dancers I’ve ever seen in my lifetime,” choreographer Mark Morris, who has been watching her for over 20 years, said.

Leaving Nrityagram has been hard. At first, Satpathy said, she felt desolate: “I experienced this shocking sense of loss of my hold on dance.” It has taken months to find it again, working alone for six hours a day in the rooftop studio of the home she shares with her husband, a photographer, just down the road from Nrityagram.

Bit by bit, she said, she has built herself up, almost from scratch. “I’ve struggled and I’m still struggling to find my solo being,” she said. “But I’ve begun to feel I’m moving differently. I feel a sense of expansiveness — literally, I own the stage.”

Working alone has also allowed her to think differently about the Odissi choreography she has been performing for so long. At Drive East, she will dance solos created by Sen, as well as more traditional works by Kelucharan Mohapatra, the teacher and choreographer who is considered responsible for reviving Odissi in the 20th century.

Though its basic poses and technique have been passed down over generations, there is room for expressive variety within the form. No two dancers, or choreographers, are alike.

“I find myself questioning things,” Satpathy said. “Sometimes I feel, hmm, maybe I could do something different here.” Whereas before she labored to complete someone else’s ideas, now, for the first time, she has found herself wondering what it would be like to create a piece of her own.

“I have the urge to choreograph, but I’m petrified,” she said, her eyes widening dramatically. Even so, she has given herself permission to try. She is now working on a solo inspired by a poem from “The Gita Govinda,” a 12th-century Sanskrit text that recounts the vagaries of the love between the god Krishna and the milkmaid Radha. In this particular song, Krishna expresses his longing for Radha, who refuses to see him.

“It’s about the wrenching pain of separation,” Satpathy said, a subject particularly on her mind these days. In the solo, she moves slowly, heavily, low to the ground, her body weighted with sadness. A new dancer, distinct from the one who performed with Nrityagram, is emerging. “The way I’m moving, I haven’t seen Surupa move,” she said, referring to Sen. The solo, she added, is to debut in December at the Margazhi Dance and Music Festival in Chennai.

Like the works she will be dancing in New York, the new solo reveals Satpathy’s remarkable ability to transform herself through movement and the mimed expression known in Indian dance as abhinaya. In one of the pieces on the Drive East program, “Sita Haran” — an episode from the epic poem “The Ramayana,” choreographed by the guru Mohapatra — she embodies no fewer than six characters.

As the lord Rama, she elongates her spine and holds out her arms in a taut, muscular gesture, as if shooting an arrow from a bow. Then her spine softens into an S-curve, and she tilts her head slightly. Now she is Sita, Rama’s consort, watching in delight as a deer cavorts in the forest. In an instant, she becomes the deer, jumping and skittering in intricate patterns across the stage. As she shifts from one character to the next, everything about her changes, from her gait to the expression in her eyes, as well as her relation to the floor and even the air around her.

In another solo, “Sakhi He,” choreographed by Sen, she depicts Radha confiding in a friend about the sexual ecstasy she has experienced in the arms of Krishna. “My waist chain loosened, Krishna caught my hair, kissed me, and fulfilled my desire,” the lyrics say, as the steps illustrate the chain flying and hair loosening. “She’s knowingly in character because she’s a great dancer and an adult, passionate woman with really good taste,” said Morris of Satpathy’s ability to portray erotic emotion.

Satpathy is as frank about what this dance means to her as she is about the other stories she depicts. When she’s dancing them, they are real, even though she is not a religious person. “I am an agnostic, if not an atheist,” she told me, but onstage she feels the emotions and urges of the gods and goddesses as if they were her own. “I’m able to tap into Radha,” she said, “because the dance form holds that feeling within it, and I’ve completely given myself over to the dance form. It’s the dance that contains within itself the belief. That is my religion.”

It is this desire to lose herself in the movement, and in the stories that it embodies, that drives her, and, in turn, makes her dancing so riveting to watch. It’s no coincidence that the title of the show at Drive East is “Kalpana,” the Sanskrit word for imagination. Alone onstage, Satpathy is finally free to live within the world she has conjured in her mind. “It’s a luxury,” she said, “to live in this world you create as if it’s real. In this way, my inner experience seeks completion.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/arts/dance/bijayini-satpathy-odissi.html" id="46ed3360-b82b-3f79-a0f4-7938d7057215">The New York Times</a>.

A Great Odissi Dancer Conjures Gods and Demons Alone

NEW YORK — On a memorable night a few years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the classical Indian dancers Bijayini Satpathy and Surupa Sen performed a duet in front of the great sandstone Temple of Dendur. Time stood still, every detail of their partnering so seamless that they appeared almost as one body, moving in harmony with the music.

The cause was heart failure, said Nicholas Ade, the school’s chief executive.

Weary’s school, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, is located about a half-hour west of Harrisburg, in Carlisle. There, since the 1950s, she inculcated the fundamentals of ballet technique, without affectations or shortcuts, in thousands of students from around the country.

“Her teaching was very clear, very succinct,” Ade said. “She broke things down. She would work on a tendu,” a sliding of the foot away from the body, “until it was done perfectly. Her genius is that she knew when to move on and when to slow down.”

Her reputation for deliberate, exacting training was the reason so many gifted students came to Carlisle. Graduates are on the rosters of nearly every important American company, including New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet and Miami City Ballet.

Weary’s former pupils have included Geoffrey Cirio, a principal dancer at English National Ballet, and Ashley Bouder, a principal at New York City Ballet. Many have gone on to become teachers, choreographers and company directors.

Ade said in a phone interview that Weary was particularly proud when she heard just days before her death that Jonathan Stafford, whom she trained in the 1990s, had recently been selected to become artistic director of New York City Ballet. (She also trained his sister, Abi Stafford, a principal at the company.)

“She made us feel lucky to be able to study ballet, to be pursuing a higher art and be surrounded by classical music,” Stafford said by email. “When you’re dancing, it’s not just about steps — it’s about living and breathing the music and letting your soul and your personality come out.”

Petite and soft-spoken, with a singsongy voice, Weary nevertheless had an intensity about her. She would often get down on the floor and mold her dancers’ feet into the perfect position.

“She used to walk into the studio, this small woman wearing a lavender sweater, with that brisk little walk and her pearl earrings,” said Darla Hoover, who studied with Weary in the 1970s and went on to dance at New York City Ballet. She would watch the dancers and call out, “Don’t get tired!” Hoover became a teacher at Weary’s school and is now associate artistic director.

The care taken to instill correct and well-articulated movement was the result, in part, of Weary’s own realization that she had received inferior training early on. Weary began her ballet studies late, at 14, at local schools in Carlisle, where she grew up.

“She always thought she’d like to dance,” her sister Sandra Lee Weary said in a telephone interview. “But it wasn’t until high school that she got the chance.” Their parents were avid social dancers, she said, and Marcia and her two sisters loved to watch them.

When she traveled to New York in her teens to audition for ballet companies, Ade said she told him, “she was laughed at” because of her bad form. In an attempt to catch up, she attended the School of Ballet Repertory in New York in the summer, under the instruction of Thalia Mara and her husband at the time, Arthur Mahoney, two leading pedagogues.

The rest of the year, Weary sold classified ads at the local newspaper, The Sentinel, to pay for her ballet classes.

She found her true calling in teaching. Carlisle, where she opened her first school in 1955 at the age of 19, is surrounded by farmland. She converted a sheep barn into a school, then called the Marcia Dale School of Dance. It consisted of a single studio, large enough for no more than a dozen students.

Soon two more studios were added. In 1974, the school was renamed Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet; it eventually expanded to three buildings in various locations in and around Carlisle, with a total of 15 studios and a large faculty. Around 300 students aged 4 to 19 attend during the regular school year, with many moving with their families to the area; 600 take part in the academy’s summer programs.

Because of her particular admiration for George Balanchine, Weary’s students often performed his works, including “Serenade,” “Divertimento No. 15” and “Emeralds,” at their yearly performances.

The school performs Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” every year at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg and the Hershey Theater in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It is the only school given permission by the Balanchine Trust to do so.

Weary often helped her students financially as well. In a recent Instagram post, Bouder of New York City Ballet recalled that Weary would buy pointe shoes for her when her family could not afford them, and would give her free private lessons.

Marcia Dale Weary was born in Carlisle on March 31, 1936, the middle daughter of Dale Edwin Weary, a surveyor and bookkeeper, and Melva Grace (Farrow) Weary, a homemaker. She attended elementary schools in Pennsylvania and Alabama, where, during World War II, her father had a job as a warehouse supervisor near Mobile. It was there that Weary was exposed to ballet, at the recital of a family friend.

In addition to Sandra Weary, her older sister, Weary is survived by her younger sister, Rosemary Lyn Weary.

Weary continued to teach daily until late last year, specializing in her younger students.

“Every child should take ballet,” she once told an interviewer. “Not to become a ballet dancer, but to be exposed to classical music. Being exposed to classical music gives them beautiful thoughts and much more vivid imaginations.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/06/obituaries/marcia-dale-weary-dead.html" id="5fb733d9-302f-38d0-af02-7aa6f670612f">The New York Times</a>.

Marcia Dale Weary, a dance teacher whose school in rural Pennsylvania trained a number of prominent ballet dancers and helped populate the ranks of many major companies, died Monday in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, just outside Harrisburg. She was 82.

Marcia Dale Weary, Heartland Ballet Teacher, Is Dead at 82

The cause was pneumonia, her sister Rona Nadine Affoumado said.

Zall was known for vivid portrayals of women drawn from history, including Mary Queen of Scots and the French author who wrote under the pseudonym George Sand, as well as fictional characters, like Amanda Wingfield from Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie.” Lean, small of stature and angular of build, she gave performances that were praised for their commitment and focus. British critic Judith Mackrell described her as bearing “an almost unnerving resemblance to Graham herself.”

In a telephone interview, Penny Frank, a former colleague on the faculty of the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music &amp; Art and Performing Arts, recalled Zall’s intensity. “She was small,” she said, “but she made this up with the force of her dancing. And her choreography was the same.”

Zall also appeared in dances taught to her by choreographers from the Martha Graham circle, including Graham’s teacher, Ruth St. Denis, and Anna Sokolow, a founding member of the Actors Studio. Zall was even given permission to perform the famous 1930 Graham solo “Lamentation,” in which the dancer expresses her grief through anguished movements magnified by a cloaklike costume — a rare occurrence for a dancer not in the company.

Over the last two decades, she had begun staging works for younger dancers. These included her own and those of her mentors, as well as pieces by the longtime Graham dancer Bertram Ross, a close friend. (When he died in 2003, Ross left the rights to all his dances to Zall.) In 2014 she formed her own ensemble, the Deborah Zall Project: In the Company of Women, consisting mostly of former members of the Graham company.

She was a committed teacher of Graham’s dance technique. “I teach the orthodox technique,” she told the magazine Dance Teacher in 2015, “exactly what Martha Graham taught me.” At various points, she was an instructor at the Martha Graham School in New York, the Laban Dance Center and the Place in London and, most lastingly, LaGuardia High School, where she was on the faculty from 1994 to 2011.

During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Zall spent considerable time in Los Angeles, where she created a work, “Pastorale,” for the Los Angeles Ballet, then under the direction of John Clifford, a former New York City Ballet dancer. (She also taught at the company school.)

“She was extremely musical,” Clifford said in an email, “and emotionally connected to the students. And she did a spot-on Martha Graham imitation.”

Deborah Miriam Zall was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 2, 1934, the eldest daughter of Edward Isaac Zall, a salesman, and Esther (Perelstein) Zall, a bookkeeper. She is survived by her two younger sisters, Rona Nadine Affoumado and Greta Louise Kenney. Her marriage to Robert Sacks ended in divorce.

After high school, Zall left for New York City, where she trained at the Juilliard School, the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater and the Martha Graham School. Then, instead of joining a company, she struck out on her own, creating evenings of dance and sometimes appearing as a guest with other troupes.

“She was very independent-minded,” her sister Rona said in a phone interview, “and she was stubborn as hell. She had this very clear vision of the kind of performances she wanted to do, centered around women. She needed that kind of independence.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/obituaries/deborah-zall-dead.html" id="aa796be8-b07f-3fa0-ac28-75f8291772d4">The New York Times</a>.

Deborah Zall, 84, Dies; Depicted Extraordinary Women in Dance

NEW YORK — Deborah Zall, a dancer and choreographer who studied with Martha Graham and went on to make her own mark with solo works depicting extraordinary women, died on Dec. 11 in Manhattan. She was 84.

Her brother, Frost Bernie Wilkinson Jr., confirmed her death but did not specify a cause.

The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo was a high-profile company that toured the United States in the 1940s and ′50s, and the appearance of an African-American onstage as a Sylph or a Swan in the South could incur threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Though Wilkinson was lighter-skinned and encouraged to wear pale makeup onstage, she always refused to hide her race.

In recent years, she was a mentor and friend to Misty Copeland, who in 2015 became the first African-American ballerina to be named a principal dancer at American Ballet Theater in New York, one of the nation’s most important companies.

Copeland came across Wilkinson’s story in the 2005 film “Ballets Russes,” and credits her with having encouraged her to persevere in a field that is still heavily weighted toward white dancers. The two met in 2011, and in 2015, Wilkinson was present at Copeland’s New York debut in the lead role of “Swan Lake,” bringing her flowers onstage. Their friendship inspired Copeland’s recent children’s book, “Firebird.”

Anne Raven Wilkinson was born Feb. 2, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in a middle-class home in Harlem, a daughter of Frost B. and Anne J. Wilkinson. Her father was a dentist and her mother a homemaker.

Anne was 5 when she attended her first ballet, “Coppélia,” performed by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. “I remember being so overwhelmed that I started crying,” she said in an interview in 2014 with dance writer Margaret Fuhrer in Pointe Magazine.

Her mother wanted to enroll her in the School of American Ballet in New York but was told that Anne was too young. She ended up at the private studio of Maria Swoboda, a Russian teacher who had been a member of the Bolshoi Ballet and the Chicago Civic Opera Ballet.

Swoboda’s school was bought by Serge Denham, director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in 1954, and Wilkinson auditioned with the company several times, only to be rebuffed. Through a friend in the administration, she learned that the company was hesitant to hire a black dancer because of its regular tours in the segregated South.

Wilkinson soon enrolled at Columbia University, which she attended for two years, but she persisted in her attempts to join the Ballet Russe, and on her fourth try she was admitted on a trial basis.

She officially joined the company in 1955 and performed a varied repertoire, including the waltz solo in Michel Fokine’s “Les Sylphides,” the Chinese Tea dance in “The Nutcracker,” a featured role in “Raymonda” and ensemble roles in numerous one-act ballets.

But as the seasons passed, a series of unpleasant racial incidents during the company’s Southern tours began to take its toll. In one performance, as she described it in “Ballets Russes,” two men came down the aisle of the theater yelling, “Where’s the nigger?” The men went onstage, moving from group to group in the ensemble, before eventually leaving.

She remembered being asked at a hotel in Georgia whether she was black and, after answering yes, being forced to move to a hotel for “colored” people.

“The company members supported me all the way,” Wilkinson said in an interview with Dance/USA years later.

She eventually stopped taking part in Southern tours, left the company in 1961 and stopped dancing altogether for two years.

“She had a hard time,” her brother said, “but she didn’t discuss it a great deal.”

She never danced for another American ballet company.

“Sometimes my heart hurt,” she said in the Dance/USA interview, adding, “I thought, after I left Ballet Russe, that I would never get back on stage again.”

In 1967, however, she auditioned with the Dutch National Ballet, encouraged to do so by another African-American dancer, Sylvester Campbell, then dancing with the company. She got in, and stayed with the troupe for seven years.

During that period American ballerina Virginia Johnson saw Wilkinson perform a duet with Campbell — “Flower Festival in Genzano,” by Danish choreographer August Bournonville — in a guest appearance at the Capitol Ballet in Washington.

“She was exquisite,” Johnson wrote in an email. “Back then I wasn’t thinking in terms of black or white, just that I wanted to dance like that. Nowadays, though, I am realizing that she was the first black ballerina I ever saw.”

Missing home, Wilkinson returned to New York in 1973 and, the next year, at nearly 40, joined New York City Opera, serving first as a member of its ballet ensemble. Later, after retiring from dancing, she became a supernumerary with the company, taking part in the stage action during operas. She stayed until the company’s demise, in 2011.

“She was so loved,” Susan Woelzl, who was a press representative for the company, said by telephone. “And none of us knew about her past. She never talked about it.”

Wilkinson said his sister had never wanted to be considered a pioneer.

“She used to say that her race was not of significance, other than that it was imposed on her,” he said. “All she wanted was to dance.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/obituaries/raven-wilkinson-dead.html" id="981dca46-6155-38d6-a653-a483694a2a0b">The New York Times</a>.

Raven Wilkinson, one of the first African-American dancers to perform with a major ballet company, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 83.

Raven Wilkinson, Black Ballerina Who Braved Segregated South, Dies at 83

Contemplating these artifacts or peering at a wealth of historical dance footage are now a natural extension of the city’s vast cultural offerings. Just as important, the materials helped to preserve a fragile art form’s legacy.

It would not have been possible without the work of one woman, Genevieve Oswald. Oswald was the founder, and for its first 43 years, the curator and tireless champion of the library’s dance collection.

She died March 19 at her home in Santa Clarita, California. She was 97. Her daughter, Anne Johnston, confirmed the death.

In 1944, armed with a fresh undergraduate degree in music, Oswald came to New York to study singing. At first she supported herself with a job selling train tickets at the old Penn Station, but before long she was working at the New York Public Library.

Oswald began by cataloging the 375 dance-related books and three dozen boxes of dance programs and clippings then held in the music division at the library’s main building on 42nd Street.

She became curator when the dance collection was formally established in 1947, presiding over a room on the library’s ground floor. In 1965 the dance collection moved into a new branch of the library at Lincoln Center. This year it celebrates the 75th anniversary of the beginning of that tiny collection, which has grown to more than41,000 books, 26,000 films, 2,700 prints and many other things.

Alastair Macaulay, the former chief dance critic for The New York Times, wrote earlier this year that it was “the largest, most eclectic and most enterprising collection of dance materials anywhere.”

And it is open to anyone, without the need for credentials or scholarly affiliation. All one needs is a library card.

This freedom of access was central to Oswald’s project, as laid out in an article she wrote for The Times about the collection in 1954: “It is important that the public be able to get dance information, because the dance art can be considerably strengthened and more firmly established if its public is well-informed.”

Oswald, known as Gegi (pronounced “Gigi”), also saw herself as an advocate for a fragile art.

There is no commonly accepted notation system for recording dances, which means that for centuries, before film, many dances fell out of the historical record.

“Gegi always talked about how she was collecting around the absence of the dance itself,” the current curator of the collection, Linda Murray, said in an interview. “That’s why she collected sculptures and shoes and photographs and musical scores.”

Oswald tirelessly pursued new collections, with a wide focus. After seeking out materials related to American modern dance — the library contains the collections of the dancer-choreographers Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Ted Shawn, as well as extensive material on Katherine Dunham, among others — she turned her attention to ballet, and later to Asian dance. She even sent raw film stock to dance companies in India, China and Japan, asking them to record their work and send it back for safekeeping.

Sometimes those records became a vital link to a tradition in peril. As dance historian Lynn Matluck Brooks described in a 2011 essay for Dance Chronicle about Oswald, recordings made of the Classical Khmer Ballet of Cambodia at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1971 later became teaching tools for Cambodian dance teachers who had survived the massacres of the Khmer Rouge. The regime had attempted to obliterate all traces of Khmer culture, including dance.

In the 1960s, Oswald turned her energy to assembling an extensive archive of dance films. The film archive became one the most important and widely used parts of the collection. It is not unusual to see dancers from various companies seated at monitors watching performances from the past.

“The film archive is a second home for me,” New York City Ballet dancer Silas Farley said in an email. “It’s like an immersive family tree. By studying the footage of my teachers when they were in their dancing glory, I come to better understand my place in that lineage.”

The ever-growing film library is financed in part by a gift from Jerome Robbins, who in 1964 dedicated 1 percent of his royalties from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” (he directed and choreographed the original production) for its upkeep. He also left his personal archive to the collection, which was renamed the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in 1999, a year after his death.

Until her retirement in 1987, Oswald continued innovating: developing a comprehensive cataloging system for dance, starting an oral history project, mounting countless exhibitions. She also taught dance history at New York University from 1970 to 1994.

Genevieve Mary Oswald was born in Buffalo, New York, on Aug. 24, 1921, the elder of two daughters of Charles Oswald, a shipping company clerk, and Jeannette Glenn Oswald. Her sister, Jeanne, died some time ago.

Oswald attended the Sacred Heart Academy and then went on to the North Carolina College for Women, which later became the University of Northern Carolina at Greensboro.

She met her husband, Dean Leslie Johnson, while she was working in the public library’s music division. He was a graduate student in music, doing research there, and went on to become a music teacher in the city’s public schools. They married in 1949. Johnson died in 1981.

In addition to her daughter, Oswald is survived by a son, Charles John Johnson, and four grandchildren.

“She had this prodigious energy, focus and enthusiasm,” Ann Johnston said of her mother. “There was always music in the house, and lots of esoteric knowledge. Even as kids, we knew about Lincoln Kirstein and the 19th-century ballerina Marie Taglioni.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/genevieve-oswald-dead.html" id="9588b2eb-6b34-3a61-aa88-203f745f3e86">The New York Times</a>.

Genevieve Oswald, the Soul of a Dance Archive, Is Dead at 97

On any given day, you can walk into the dance division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and request to see the ballet slippers of the early-20th-century ballerina Anna Pavlova, or a silk flower garland that adorned the modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, or countless other items in a vast repository of materials on dance.

The dance is instantly recognizable as the Candy Cane solo from George Balanchine’s beloved 1954 production of “The Nutcracker,” for New York City Ballet. But this figure sketched in pencil and flickering before our eyes dates from much earlier.

It was drawn sometime between 1900 and 1907 by Alexander Shiryaev, a former dancer of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia, who, after retiring from the stage, became a pioneer in recording dances on film.

The film, an early and rudimentary kind of animation, consists of 2,000 or so drawings, each pose, step and transition illustrated on a narrow strip of paper, one after another, then threaded through a special projector. What’s extraordinary is that Shiryaev not only captured the dance in this ingenious way, but that he also created the dance itself. That’s why he knew every detail so well.

It wasn’t uncommon at the time for particularly experienced dancers to create their own numbers in big ballets. So when choreographer Lev Ivanov was staging the original “Nutcracker” in St. Petersburg, in 1892, he let Shiryaev make up his own Trepak, or Ukrainian dance, full of twisting jumps and leaps in which the legs clap together in the air.

Shiryaev entered the school of the Imperial Ballet at 9 and became what was known as a character dancer, specializing in the acrobatic, folk-inflected moments that spiced up big classical ballets. Later, he trained generations of dancers including Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet.

Balanchine performed the hoop dance as a young member of the ballet company in St. Petersburg. (He probably learned it from Shiryaev.) It must have stayed with him, because when he made his own “Nutcracker” in New York decades later, he inserted a very similar version into his production.

In both, the dancer executes a series of turning pas de chats (jumps with the feet tucked under) followed by cabrioles (in which the two legs tap together in the air) to the front and to the back. In both, the dancer jumps through the hoop while turning, over and over and to increasingly impressive effect.

Both versions end with the same pose: the dancer holding the hoop in his left hand, his right hand outstretched. Balanchine’s only concession to his new country was to call the sequence “The Dance of the Candy Canes” rather than the more traditional “Buffoon Dance” or Trepak.

“It couldn’t be more vivid,” Daniel Ulbricht, who has been dancing the role of Candy Cane at City Ballet for almost 20 years, said after watching Shiryaev’s movie. “It’s so clear that Balanchine knew exactly what he was going to do; it was part of his lineage and his training. Even the costume is the same.”

There’s something ghostly about watching recognizable choreography emerge from the murky depths of dance history more than a hundred years after the fact. In a very concrete way, you get a sense of ballet’s performance tradition, the way dances are passed down over time. Very few dance films from the early 20th century have survived, so normally we have to imagine what these old dances looked like, or rely on highly technical notations, decipherable only by specialists.

But Shiryaev’s films have come to light thanks to the dogged research (and luck) of one man, the Russian dance historian and documentarian Viktor Bocharov, who tracked them down in the mid-1990s. We may not have footage of the original Sugarplum Fairy or the Waltz of the Flowers, but we have this hoop dance.

Shiryaev is little-known outside Russia; even there, he is known more for his teaching at the ballet academy than for his pioneering dance films. He wrote a memoir, but it has never been published. Most of his surviving dance films — there are several dozen, both animated and live action — were created between his retirement from the stage and a decade of teaching in Western Europe.

Few people, even dancers, knew about the films — he showed them only to friends and a few students. After he died, in 1941, they ended up in the hands of a Daniil Saveliev, a student of his who had gone on to become a photographer.

As Bocharov recounts in his 2004 documentary “A Belated Premiere,” which came to the Dance on Camera Festival in New York in 2005, the first evidence he uncovered of Shiryaev’s cinematic activities was a 1904 letter he found in the State Historical Archive. In it, Shiryaev requested permission to film rehearsals at the Imperial Ballet — a request that was denied. Bocharov kept digging until a former employee of the photography department at the St. Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music led him to Saveliev.

Saveliev’s collection contained several dozen films of various types. Some, like the Hoop Dance, were animated drawings. Others documented dances performed by Shiryaev, his wife and friends at the Shiryaev summer house in Ukraine.

And yet others were sophisticated stop-action animations created using small wire and papier-mâché puppets, which Shiryaev would manipulate thousands of times to faithfully reproduce choreography. A contemporary of Shiryaev wrote that a groove had been worn into the floor of his home studio along the path between the camera and the puppet theater. But the films were never shown in a cinema.

Bocharov acquired the whole collection and used many excerpts in “A Belated Premiere.” (It can be seen in four sections on YouTube.) The films, particularly the stop-action puppet ballets, are incredibly lifelike and precise. Choreographers interested in historical restorations, including Alexei Ratmansky of American Ballet Theater, have consulted them.

“Those puppets and cartoon figures exist in the indistinct interspace between the living and the dead,” said the Princeton University musicologist Simon Morrison, who has written extensively on ballet. “Shiryaev tried to preserve ballet on film almost before the existence of film, and resorted to animation almost before the existence of animation.”

Given the films’ quality and charm, it is surprising that Shiryaev’s name should not be more widely known in film circles. But, as Bocharov, who lives in St. Petersburg, said in an email: “Shiryaev did not make them for public display. It was, if you like, his hobby.” They could easily have disappeared after Shiryaev died, just months before the Siege of Leningrad.

All the more reason this Hoop Dance, scratched, jumpy and schematic, feels like a small miracle, a charm-filled vestige of another time.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/arts/dance/dance-candy-cane-hoop-movie-nutcracker-shiryaev-balanchine.html" id="eef4d936-25b7-3c08-af5d-d190d649d312">The New York Times</a>.

Ghosts of 'Nutcracker' Past, Preserved on Film

The film is scratchy and a bit jumpy, but perfectly legible. A man — actually a drawing of a man — in a striped costume executes quick, rhythmic steps while holding what looks like a Hula Hoop overhead. He does a big split in the air and, upon landing, sways side to side on the beat.

It can also be a time of anxiety, particularly for dancers at smaller companies or freelancers. With downtime comes a loss of income, which must be supplemented in other ways.

For a lucky few, summer is time — at least in part — for some much-needed rest from the demands of an art that takes its toll on the body. I spoke with dancers from different disciplines: ballet, modern, tap and Indian classical dance, about what they do in the summer months. Their accounts have been edited and condensed.

Sarah Hayes Harkins: A Ballerina Behind the Wheel

Sarah Hayes Harkins, 29, has been a dancer with Charlotte Ballet in North Carolina since 2008. Although the company has no official ranks, Harkins has performed most of the principal parts: Cinderella, Aurora in “Sleeping Beauty” and Sugarplum in “The Nutcracker.” The company has 20 dancers, for whom it guarantees at least 36 weeks of work. (This arrangement is not unusual, and 36 weeks is considered good in the field.) That leaves up to 16 unpaid weeks a year.

During the summer layoff, my husband — a classical guitarist — and I definitely have to hunker down and be really conscious of the money going out and coming in. My main source of other work here in Charlotte is teaching private ballet lessons.

I also drive for Lyft. I have a Volkswagen Tiguan, a little silver baby SUV. I make a solid average of $10 an hour. I’ll do it for most of the day and not take a break. If I stretch for a while after I’m done, I’m fine. It doesn’t make my body feel any worse than it already does.

To be honest, the time goes by very quickly. I’m a super social person so if they want to talk I’m totally down for that. For me it’s the perfect little side job. Last year I drove Aziz Ansari. I picked him up from Bojangles’ Coliseum where he had been doing a show. Aziz and his dad came out the back door and hopped in. He was really nice. He was watching videos of the show he had just done on his phone. At one point, his dad was trying to give me directions, and Aziz stopped him and said, dad, she’s got the thing, you don’t have to tell her how to get there!

Shantala Shivalingappa: Back to Nature

Chennai-born dancer Shantala Shivalingappa lives in Paris and spends much of the year on the road. Her training is in the Indian classical dance form kuchipudi, but just as often, she works with contemporary choreographers and theater directors. Each summer, Shivalingappa, 43, leaves her performing life behind and returns to India.

I spend almost 2 1/2 months in India, without anything related to performing. My parents have a farmhouse here [on the outskirts of Chennai] on a piece of land near the seaside, with coconut trees, a vegetable garden and a mango grove. The sea is just down the road. It gives me a lot of distance from my performing life. I have no plans, each day just happens.

For the first month and a half, I do no dancing at all. I don’t even listen to music. My day starts before sunrise. I do about 3 1/2 hours of yoga on the terrace. This has been my routine for the last two years and it has totally transformed me. It’s made my body much stronger and more fluid, at an age when I started feeling certain tensions and aches.

In the afternoon, I help with watering the garden or pulling weeds or picking fruit. Then I go to the beach, usually right before sunset. The wonderful thing about a warm country like India is that you’re so in touch with the elements. You feel the sun on your skin, you walk barefoot, you sit on the earth. It’s very grounding.

Shivalingappa will perform her kuchipudi evening “Akasha” at the Joyce Theater in New York in fall.

Lisa La Touche: The Improviser

Even with the recent resurgence of tap on Broadway and concert stages, the life of a tap dancer is a constant shuffle. La Touche, 38, has a distinguished career; she was in the original cast of “Shuffle Along,” on Broadway, and in Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards’ “Sophisticated Ladies,” at the Cotton Club, and has toured with Savion Glover and the show “STOMP.” Last November, she had a son, Langston. This summer has been a time to balance priorities while working almost nonstop. She has taken off a grand total of one week so far. When we spoke, she was leading a summer workshop in her hometown, Calgary.

Summers are typically really busy in the tap dance world. That’s when most of the festivals and workshops happen. In early July, I danced at the Tap City festival in New York. That got me back onstage after giving birth last November. It was like, wow! Remember how much stamina that takes? Postpartum is no joke.

Since then, I’ve been mostly teaching. Here in Calgary, I have a summer intensive that I started with one of my colleagues, Danny Nielsen, called Training Dayz. My son gets to spend time with grandma, and I can get some work done. It’s win-win. After that it’s back to New York, where I tend to teach private lessons or set up my own workshops through Labor Day. So if I want down time, I have to make it.

Motherhood, it’s like being shot out of a cannon. But I’m still an artist. A freelance artist. I’m working on a show with another tap dancer, Kazunori Kumagai, for 2020. In the absence of institutional support, I had to make a two-year plan so I could pay myself maternity leave. Thank god I love to improvise, because motherhood is the biggest improvisation I’ve ever done.

Michael Trusnovec: Don’t Look Back

Months before his final performance with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, at the end of June — after two decades in the company — Michael Trusnovec, 44, was cramming his schedule with projects. Idleness is not in his nature. The biggest of these is a new festival he is starting up with two of his former Taylor colleagues, Laura Halzack and Michelle Fleet, and his husband, V.J. Carbone, a film publicist. The Asbury Park Dance Festival will have its debut Sept. 14, with dancers from the Paul Taylor, Martha Graham and Doug Varone companies, as well as tapper Caleb Teicher.

I don’t think I’ve had a minute to contemplate the implications and the weight of leaving the company yet. It’s all about the art of distraction and deflection. Literally the morning after my final performance I flew to the American Dance Festival to finish staging Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade.” It wound up being the perfect thing for me to do at that moment — “Esplanade” was the first Taylor dance I ever learned.

We started planning the festival about 10 months ago. Asbury Park has changed so rapidly; there’s a lot of art, a lot of music. We have a great community of friends there, a lot of arts people. People in the dance community were really enthusiastic. We’re doing it to support a local arts organization, ArtsED New Jersey.

There’s a level of relief in not dancing as much. I needed a break from that relentless drive. I still want to perform for a bit longer, but I also want to try other things I couldn’t do before. I do have a new sense of freedom to do that.

Calvin Royal III: New Steps

For the last few years, American Ballet Theater soloist Calvin Royal III, 30, has been on the cusp of stardom. Some of his most interesting challenges have actually come during the summers, in three stints at the Vail Dance Festival. This summer, he got his first stab at one of the most desirable roles of all: the lead in George Balanchine’s “Apollo,” a ballet about a young god in training, testing his powers. At Vail, he danced with Unity Phelan, a New York City Ballet soloist.

I’ve always seen images and clips of “Apollo.” I’ve seen myself wanting to dance the role but never thought the opportunity would present itself. During the performance I just felt this sense of calm. I even forgot about the altitude. Also, dancing with Unity — we have this chemistry that makes me feel like I’m able to really be in the moment and not be afraid.

My partnership with Unity is probably the strongest I have, which is crazy, since we’re not even in the same company. We come together at this amazing festival each year and dance these iconic ballets together.

After the festival, I [went] on a road trip to the Southwest with my partner. We [wanted] to visit some national parks and be in nature. At the beginning of vacation, I don’t want to move at all. No dancing. Probably toward the end of the holiday I’ll start doing my own barre so that when I come back it’s not a complete shock. Before we left New York we had some fittings with Twyla [Tharp], who is making a ballet for us this fall. She said, “Enjoy your holiday but make sure you come back in shape!”

Royal will have his New York debut in Apollo on Oct. 17 during American Ballet Theatre’s fall season at the Lincoln Center.

For Dancers, the Not-So-Lazy Days of Summer

A body in motion tends to stay in motion, so summer can present a challenge for dancers. For those who work at ballet companies, the period after July 4 usually means a layoff of at least a few weeks. But free time doesn’t necessarily mean sloth. (Although, like all of us, dancers crave rest.) Summer is festival season. With events like the Vail Dance Festival or the Fire Island Dance Festival, the summer months can offer opportunities to try on new roles or different styles, to choreograph o...

He said a few final words to the dancers: “Remember, there is a mystery about the seasons, a divine energy. It’s more than pretty dances. There is an inescapable force that makes these things happen.”

The dancers found their places, and the room went quiet. Then the rehearsal pianist, Jacek Mysinski, began to play the first glistening notes of the Glazunov score. The dances unspooled one after another with a kind of inexorable momentum: a small ensemble driven by the winter wind, a solo full of footwork as sharp as shards of ice. Each section embodied a quality drawn from nature; solos and duets highlighted the attributes of the individual dancers — boldness, sensuality, attack, lyricism.

“The Seasons,” which is to have its premiere at Ballet Theatre’s spring gala May 20, is Ratmansky’s 16th ballet for the company, where he has been the artist in residence since 2009. In those 10 years, the dancers have grown conversant with his style, which combines a pliant use of legs with a mobile and free upper body; crisp, rhythmic attack coupled with melodic sweep.

By now, some Ballet Theatre dancers have spent their entire careers performing his dances; the famously difficult choreography has shaped their technique and stage personas. “The other day,” Kevin McKenzie, the company’s artistic director, said in his office near Union Square, “they were rehearsing ‘On the Dnieper’” — Ratmansky’s first ballet for the company, out of repertory for almost a decade — “and I asked myself, ‘Why does it look so different now?’”

He said he realized that no one in that original cast had ever worked with Ratmansky — they were strangers to each other. But now “the ballet can come to life in a way it never could have before,” McKenzie added. “Through working with him, the dancers have come to know themselves and what they’re capable of.”

NEW YORK — On a recent afternoon, choreographer Alexei Ratmansky stood at the front of a large studio at American Ballet Theatre, preparing to run through, “The Seasons,” his latest ballet for the company.