Rudi van Dantzig

Rudi van Dantzig (4 August 1933 – 19 January 2012) was a Dutch choreographer, company director, and writer. He was a pivotal figure in the rise to world renown of Dutch ballet in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Van Dantzig was born in Amsterdam, where his father, Murk van Dantzig, worked in a Fokker aircraft factory. His parents held strongly leftwing views, espousing Marxism, advocating pacifism, and promoting Esperanto. He was six years old when the German army defeated Dutch forces in the Battle of the Netherlands in May 1940 and occupied the country at the beginning of World War II. During the occupation of his homeland, young Rudi was sent to stay in a foster home in Friesland, where conditions were safer than in the city. During liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945, he met Walter Cook, a young soldier in the First Canadian Army, which was largely responsible for the defeat of German forces in Holland. His friendship and love affair with this soldier, who was lost to him when he was suddenly transferred away, provided the basis for his prizewinning novel Voor een Verloren Soldaat (For a Lost Soldier), published in the Netherlands in 1986 and later filmed and translated into English.

Upon returning to school in Amsterdam, van Dantzig proved to be a poor scholar, uninterested in most of his schoolwork. When he wandered into a cinema showing The Red Shoes (1948), the ballet film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, his future path was decided. Inspired by viewing the film multiple times, he began taking ballet lessons at age 16 with Anna Sybranda and then with Sonia Gaskell, a former Ballets Russes dancer who ran a school and a small classical company in the city. There was a shortage of talented male dancers in postwar Europe, so, although he was not highly skilled, Gaskell engaged him in 1954 as a member of her company, Ballet Recital. He was tall, good looking, highly intelligent, and hard working, and he soon showed a gift for choreography. That same year Martha Graham and her company paid their first visit to the Netherlands, and her technique and style had a profound effect on van Dantzig. Realizing new possibilities for drama and expressiveness in dance, he soon traveled to New York to continue his training at her school.

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