Transitions - dancers, United States - Obituary

Besides performing with Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Sadler's Wells, and Roland Petit's company, Orloff appeared on Broadway, garnering accolades in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Pipe Dream (1955) and in the revival of On Your Toes (1954), where he was typecast (by George Balanchine) as a Russian dancer. He starred with Violet Verdy in Dream Ballerina (1950), a French film about a dancer with three beaus.

Orloff was an innovative dancer who created many roles but disdained modern dance, notes his son, photographer Alex Orloff. "The apogee of his career was in the late 1940s and '50s; after that he directed the Norwegian Opera Ballet and later went to the Berlin Opera and to Rome." In addition, he worked with companies in Denver, Cleveland, Nashville, and Spokane.

In the early 1960s, "he was in great shape and taught in the spirit of the old Russians. He put on his boots and we could see what a great dancer he had been," remembers former character student Florence Geise, artistic director of Pennsylvania's Schuylkill Ballet Theatre. "He had Slavic features, very handsome. His classes were lively and colorful." After his "Sunday Specials" (two-hour technique classes), his students would gather in a bar. "He would hold court and pontificate. My father was a great philosopher," says Alex Orloff.

Until he was curtailed by a major stroke three years ago, Orloff taught at City Center, Broadway Arts, and at Teresa Aubel's Once Upon a Time studios in Richmond Hill, New York. "He wanted to work on epaulement, which he felt that the children needed. He was very spunky, very cantankerous, and didn't always tell you what you wanted to hear," says Aubel, one of Orloff's former students. Nevertheless, sometimes he did--during a moment of student angst, she said, "He came up from behind me and said, `Don't lose your fantasy.' I was shocked that he knew."

Once asked by Aubel's husband, Mark, how he wanted to be remembered, Orloff answered, "Dancer."

--Karen Dacko