Todd Bolender

Todd Bolender (February 27, 1914 – October 12, 2006) was a renowned ballet dancer, teacher, choreographer, and director. He was an instrumental figure in the creation and dissemination of classical dance and ballet as an American art form. A child of the American Midwest during the Great Depression, he studied under George Balanchine and led the Kansas City Ballet in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1980 to 1995.

Born in Canton, Ohio on February 27, 1914, Bolender grew up in a family in which the arts, music and theater in particular, were an important part of life. The extremely lively child—one of four—was early on dubbed the dancer of the family and his physical energy channeled in lessons in acrobatic tap. In 1931, when he was 17, Bolender went to New York, which he said in an interview in 2002 seemed to him like a “kind of heaven”, to study theatrical dance. In 1933 he moved to New York for good, taking up full-time residence there at about the same time George Balanchine arrived in this country.

Attendance at a concert by Mary Wigman led Bolender to Hanya Holm, who he said later saved him from bad teaching. Social acquaintance with Balanchine, however, made a strong impression. Under Balanchine’s supervision, Bolender studied at the fledgling School of American Ballet with such Russian teachers as Pierre Vladimiroff, Felia Dubrovska, Anatole Oboukhoff and Ludmilla Schollar. He also trained with Muriel Stuart and, pursuing a strong interest in modern dance, studied with Louis Horst and Harald Kreutzberg. The two greatest influences on his choreography, Bolender was to say later, were Wigman and Uday Shankar, both of whom he saw perform in New York in the early thirties, along with Kreutzberg. Asked why he became a ballet dancer, Bolender said simply it was the Depression and he needed a job.

...
Wikipedia