Violette Verdy ballet's Descartes - awarded CORPS de Ballet International

Dance Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Martha Ullman West

VIOLETTE VERDY SETTLES herself on the end of the bed in her Seattle hotel room, one leg extended, the other turned out and bent at the knee in a position, albeit seated, reminiscent of her joyous jump in George Balanchine's Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, one of many roles created for her during close to twenty years of dancing with New York City Ballet.

Since 1996, Verdy has been professor of ballet in the School of Music at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, a position she holds concurrently with her advisory role at The Rock School of the Pennsylvania Ballet. She was in Seattle last July to receive an award for lifetime achievement in dance from CORPS de Ballet International, also known as the Council of Organized Researchers of Pedagogical Studies of Ballet.

The professional association of college-level ballet teachers--with close to 100 members--first met in June 1998, the brainchild of Florida State University's Richard Sias. Willam Christensen, who established the first university ballet department in the United States at the University of Utah in the early 1950s, received the organization's initial award last year.

Because of the acuteness of her musicality and the clarity of her dancing, Verdy is considered by many to be one of the foremost interpreters of Balanchine's work, particularly in the roles he created for her in the "Emeralds" segment of Jewels, the long-lost Figure in the Carpet, and Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, but also in Symphony in C and Theme and Variations. A dancer of enormous and expressive range, Verdy was already a seasoned dancer when at 25 she joined New York City Ballet in 1958, having performed with Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre)just long enough to dance the role of Miss Julie in the company premiere of Birgit Cullberg's ballet of the same name. Roland Petit, whom she first met as a very young student in Paris, considered her, next to his wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, his best Carmen, and she had already danced Giselle as a guest with La Scala, learning much later that Balanchine was one of the people who recommended her for the role.

Given the time and place she was born, the supremely gifted Verdy did not become the dancer she was without overcoming extraordinary hardships. Her seasoning was hard come by, and Verdy says the many lessons she learned help her today as a teacher.

Verdy was born Nelly Guillerm in Pont l'Abbe, France, in 1933, on Brittany's hard-scrabble coast; she changed her name when she began her professional career. When Verdy was 8 and the Germans were occupying much of France, her mother took her to Paris, where she was accepted as a pupil by Russian refugee teachers Rousanne Sarkissian and her partner, Viktor Gsovsky.

Money was scarce, food even more so, and pointe shoes were almost impossible to come by in wartime, occupied France, but it is to this early training that Verdy credits her long career with Balanchine.

"I am French and had teachers in France, but they were Russian," Verdy commented. "These teachers, who were from what we call the Imperial rather than Soviet schooling, were eventually very French in their understanding of what was needed by the Paris Opera Ballet and this, with the French-Italian school of quicksilver and vivacity, became the brand and the blend of ballet. So when I met George Balanchine, I was already a French cousin in the Russian family; I was already there."

Before that, however, Verdy, a 12-year-old blue-eyed sprite with a perfectly proportioned body, was dancing professionally with Petit's Ballets des Champs-Elysees. At 16, she starred in a film called Ballerina (released in the U.S. as Dream Ballerina) about a young dancer with three balletic dreams and a slimy suitor who nearly ruins her career.

IN THE DECADE THAT FOLLOWED, Verdy continued to perform in Petit's work and danced with several other small French companies. In 1957, she danced Coppelia and Giselle with Ballet Rambert; later that year she arrived in the United States, dancing with Ballet Theatre before finding her home at NYCB. Her career has been phenomenal, although plagued with injuries--she has had three operations for tendinitis--that inevitably came as critical casting decisions were being made.

"Having had Balanchine on top of my French-Russian schooling clarified once and for all the details of technique and musicality as the reflection of that technique, which are forever clearly in my mind," Verdy said. "[Working with him] was the [finishing touch], and I would not abandon it for anything."

While she was dancing with NYCB, Verdy made many guest appearances worldwide. She was also teaching and, under the Ford Foundation program that identified students for the School of American Ballet, scouted the country for those with potential to become company members.

When she left the company in 1976, she became the first woman artistic director at the Paris Opera Ballet, a position she held for three years. A short stint as co-artistic director of Boston Ballet followed in the early 1980s. Since that time, Verdy has been using her experience on both sides of the barre, as it were, to inform her teaching, both in the university and in company and workshop settings.