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New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He Has One Last Chance to Leave It All on the Dance Floor
Andrew Veyette has been pushing himself this season, his last at New York City Ballet. But, in his 25 years with the company, he has always danced every ballet as if it were his last — with dynamism, virtuosity and joie de vivre. From his earliest years, though, what has really set him apart are two things, seemingly at odds: sheer willpower and a mischievous grin, the sort that makes you think he is laughing at himself or proposing a dare, Andy to Andy. Veyette, a principal dancer whose farewell performance is this Sunday, has always seemed to take City Ballet more seriously than he took himself. Perhaps that's what drove him to push his body beyond its limits, to be unafraid to fail. He knows things. When Tiler Peck and Roman Mejia were having problems with whip turns in Jerome Robbins's 'The Four Seasons,' they turned to Veyette for help. Veyette told Mejia: ''After the second turn, give her a little bump to the right,'' Peck said. ''She tends to fall on the second one. You just got to give her a little tap back.'' He was right. 'Roman was like whoa,' Peck said, adding that Veyette 'is kind of a quiet commander.' Veyette, 43, designed his final program to be full of technical challenges. 'Even if we see me struggle, I'm kind of OK with that,' he said. 'Because I want to find my limit in that show.' The program will showcase his versatility. Along with the third movement of Robbins's 'Glass Pieces' — which he will dance with the corps de ballet — he is the lead in Lynne Taylor-Corbett's 'Chiaroscuro, a moody work that shows his more introspective side. He'll also dance 'Cool' from Robbins's 'West Side Story Suite' and the pas de deux and finale of George Balanchine's 'Stars and Stripes,' a ballet he's been obsessed with since he was 12. It's ambitious. 'I just want to make sure that I just leave everything I have out there,' he said. That's what his dancing is about, he added: 'I don't think I'm the prettiest dancer or the most talented dancer, but I have tried really hard to give everything I had.' There was a time in Veyette's career, around 2018 and 2019, when the idea of a celebratory farewell seemed out of reach. 'I really struggled onstage,' he said of that time. 'And at the root of that was struggles with alcoholism and dependency and depression. I took two different short stints away from the company.' The first visit to rehab didn't work out. 'I don't know if I was ready to feel better yet,' he said. 'Then I did an inpatient program in Florida.' That time, it clicked. He said he realized that what addicts often have in common is a belief: that they don't 'deserve to be OK.' And that, he added, doesn't even take into account the chemical reality of what drugs and alcohol do to the brain. 'I would leave my rehearsal day, and my feet were just walking to a bar,' he said. 'This wasn't a choice. This wasn't like, I guess I'll go do this, or something's wrong, or I'm upset.' Around that time, his oldest brother and father were both gravely ill; they died six months apart. There was also, Veyette said, 'the uncomfortable reality of being married to two different women in the company in the tumultuous time that that became.' He was married to Megan Fairchild before he met Ashley Hod, his current wife, who is a soloist at City Ballet. One of his father's last visits to New York was for an intervention. 'That had to have been really painful for him,' Veyette said. 'It was them and Ashley that saved me. I was in a really, really, really dark place.' Being open about his addiction is important, Veyette said, because 'it takes so much strength and courage to actually ask for help and to admit that you have a problem and be willing to change.' If he could give advice to young dancers, or anybody, he said, it would be to ask for support: 'That's not a weakness.' During the pandemic, he and Hod went to live with his mother in Arizona. He got back into biking. And he and Hod realized that while they love ballet, they were happy just to be with each other. In coming back to dance, Veyette wanted to leave the stage in a way that paid justice to his career. 'It could have been a very sad story,' he said. 'It very easily could have become something that I just kind of skulked away and wasn't able to get it back together.' He didn't want to be 'a side note in people's conversations,' he added. 'I would have felt like I left years on the table and let a lot of people down.' Peck, his former sister-in-law (she was married to Fairchild's brother), said, 'I think he came back a better version of himself, as a person.' Over the years, he and Fairchild have had conversations about their relationship — especially, he said, when he wasn't doing well — and about how they want each other to be happy. 'When it comes to the two women in my life and my time in the company,' he said, 'I'm almost shocked that not once but twice such remarkable people cared to spend their time with me. I'm very grateful that we can all get along now and that we've found a comfortable place at work.' He will begin his last performance with 'Glass Pieces.' There was a pact among the male dancers with whom he first performed it: The last to leave the company would include the ballet in his farewell and 'everybody else has to come out of retirement to do it,' Veyette said. One of those dancers was Jonathan Stafford, now the company's artistic director, who told him, 'I don't think I can do it, dude.' Veyette didn't really expect anyone from the old days to return to the stage. But he wanted to dance 'Glass Pieces' as a way to honor the corps de ballet part of his career and to perform with a new generation. 'I wanted to acknowledge that I didn't just see my soloist and principal rep as what I considered success in this company,' he said. BORN IN DENVER, Veyette began his dance training at 9. Before entering the company-affiliated School of American Ballet in 1998, he trained at Westside Ballet in Santa Monica, Calif. He joined City Ballet in 2000, and was promoted to soloist six years later. He has been a principal since 2007. 'My path had a lot of peaks and valleys,' Veyette said. 'Some very deep and some very high.' He knows his body isn't what it used to be. 'Sometimes I go to do something, and it just doesn't want to cooperate anymore,' he said. 'But I'm very grateful that I've been able to get into a place physically that I can kind of do something that' — he paused — 'resembles my best? You know?' Veyette and the principal Sara Mearns are not exactly the same generation, but they were part of a group that, Mearns said, 'escalated together.' They have an affectionate nickname for each other: Crazy, as in, 'Hey, Crazy.' 'There are no limits for him,' Mearns said of his dancing. 'There's no bounds for him. Especially when he was at his prime, it was like no one could out-dance that man.' After he retires, Veyette plans on staying in the ballet industry, staging works and teaching. (He teaches now at Ballet Academy East.) He said he hoped to help dancers, something Peck has witnessed with men at the company struggling with partnering. 'He's very generous with the younger guys and showing them partnering tricks,' she said. 'You don't have to be generous and share what you know. But he always does. And you can see the difference it makes immediately.' Veyette's career will culminate with one of his favorite ballets, 'Stars and Stripes.' He taught himself the choreography after watching a videotape of it when he was 12. It was the dance he performed at his Workshop Performance at the School of American Ballet. 'I know I didn't smile a single time, not the whole show, not once,' Veyette said in a robotic voice. He did, though, hit all of his turns. And now he gets one last shot at it, this time opposite his wife, Hod, in a debut. 'What are the chances, he said, that the last dance he gets to perform is 'the thing I was obsessed with as a little kid, that made me want to be a ballet dancer in New York City Ballet and that I got to do as my Workshop Ballet?' He just wishes he had smiled back then. 'I will definitely smile this time."
New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Once an Inspiration to Balanchine, Suzanne Farrell Now Shows the Way
'Too much energy, too much, too much, too much,' Suzanne Farrell said as she watched Isabella LaFreniere rehearse George Balanchine's 'Chaconne.' Farrell's direction, calling for more delicacy, softened the edges of LaFreniere's crisp attack. Over the course of an hour, Farrell transformed the pas de deux they were working on — not the haunting one that opens the ballet, but the 'pas de deux proper,' as she described its bravura counterpart — in big and small ways. There were important Farrell lessons along the way: To stay was to be stuck. To have too presentational an approach was a 'favorite hate.' And to jump with stiffly held arms, as Peter Walker, the male lead in 'Chaconne,' did during a variation, was fighting the body's natural way of moving. The arms 'don't have to be huge, but they can't be nothing,' she told Walker. 'Nothing is nothing.' And the opposite of nothing is Farrell, the ballerina whose influence, arguably, looms largest over New York City Ballet. She originated many lead roles in the company for Balanchine — the choreographer called her 'the other half of my apple' — starting with 'Meditation' in 1963, and triumphed in countless others. She feels fortunate that she entered the company when she did. 'I had the benefit of doing all those beautiful ballets that he did before I was born and then the things that we did together,' she said of the man she calls Mr. B. 'So I kind of lived his whole life in my lifetime with him.' That partnership continues through Farrell's coaching, which she was doing recently at City Ballet, her fifth visit since 2019. 'I still feel he's present,' she said. 'Not in a weird way. But in a very metaphysical kind of way.' She was happy, she said, to be back. 'The halls of the theater are just like old times, you know, like an old friend,' she said. 'I love what I do, and it's been good to me, and you have to give back. I'm the beneficiary of every dancer that came before me. No one does this alone.' As for future visits? 'I don't look that far in advance,' she said. 'I always feel that Mr. B is steering me in the direction, and I just go.' After Farrell retired from dancing in 1989, she worked as a ballet master at City Ballet until 1993; under the leadership of Peter Martins, who had been her frequent dance partner, her contract was terminated. Since Martins's retirement in 2018, a steady stream of former company members have returned to coach under the artistic direction of Jonathan Stafford. 'I love doing this,' Farrell said. 'But I didn't always get a chance to do it. So, naturally, if you don't get a chance, you say, 'I don't want to do that.' But there's a time for everything.' Originally Farrell resisted coaching. But when she formed her own company, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, which ended in 2017, she found she had to do it — because she had to do everything. 'And that was great because it was very unified,' she said. 'We were small and it was what I call united individuality. But I have to know the person before I can get deep into them to coach. You have to peel away the layers.' Farrell hasn't worked with everyone at City Ballet, of course — the company is huge — but over the past few years, she has developed relationships with some dancers, notably Mira Nadon, who danced last spring in her staging of 'Errante,' formerly 'Tzigane.' Farrell, who lives in Phoenix, has recently worked with Nadon and others including Walker, Chun Wai Chan and Tiler Peck on a film project in Arizona focusing on Balanchine's pas de deux. Her approach is not one size fits all. 'Like a writer tries to find the best word for what they want to say, I try to give the dancers, my students, this philosophy: To give them a physical thesaurus of how to dance,' Farrell said. 'When you're young, you sort of masquerade behind the easy things, the legs, and the things that a young person would find impressive. But there's so much more than just that.' During her week at City Ballet, dancers, if they were free, parked themselves in the studio under a barre to watch Farrell work. Along with 'Chaconne,' she coached 'Errante,' 'Apollo' and 'Vienna Waltzes.' She also taught company class, 'which is important because it prepares you for Mr. B's ballets,' she said. 'You can't do his ballets if you don't train his way.' Walker, who watched all of Farrell's rehearsals, said that in class she spoke about dancing with the entire body. 'You can't just leave a part behind,' he said. 'It's all coordinated and it's all engaged.' One thing Farrell insists on, Walker added, is subtlety. That fits with what he hears about 'extreme misinterpretations' of the Balanchine technique, 'how things have become so extreme.' But the reality, he said, is that 'it's not so exaggerated.' That finely drawn approach was more than evident in the performance of 'Apollo' that opened the company's spring season, with Chan as the god, and Nadon, Miriam Miller and Emily Kikta as the three muses. A lingering, however fleeting, in the choreography's photogenic moments has become ingrained over time. But Farrell emphasized the fluidity of dancing. The music steered the dancers through steps, seemingly reborn, that crystallized two fragile ingredients: simplicity and elegance. Farrell restored the ballet, the oldest in City Ballet's repertory, making it young again. Chan, who also worked with Farrell on 'Errante,' said: 'If we go with the music, the step is just going to be right, and it feels right. But if we don't listen, if you're trying to learn the step without the music, it's totally a different dynamic.' As a coach and stager of Balanchine ballets, Farrell is specific, down to earth and in natural possession of the kind of intelligence that goes hand in hand with quick humor. She isn't short on opinions. 'People are so mirror conscious, which dilutes everything,' she said. 'We're losing épaulement' — the placement of the shoulders and head — 'because everybody's looking in the mirror. I told them today I don't believe you can be an honest performer and spectator at the same time. When you are a performer, you look out of your eyes. When you're a spectator, you take in. If you look in the mirror, you become the spectator and you sap your image. It's like your aura disappears.' At one point during the 'Chaconne' rehearsal, Farrell, mirroring LaFreniere, bobbed her head up and down like a bird dipping its beak into a fountain. 'Easy, easy,' Farrell said. 'Too many heads, too many heads.' Even LaFreniere had to laugh. Farrell said later: 'I like her energy, but you don't have to have that kind of energy all the time. This pas de deux is very regal. I don't like that saying 'less is more,' because less is just less.' She illustrated her point with a story: One day, when Balanchine was teaching class, he had the dancers perform a rond de jambe, or the circular movement of the leg. On the eighth count, he made them stay still. 'People were uncomfortable that there was nothing happening,' she said. 'And he said, 'Silence is a beautiful thing.' And it is, especially in this day and age. Silence has volume. Silence has a sound. It's the absence of movement, but it's the presence of everything else.' This season Dominika Afanasenkov makes her debut in 'Errante' opposite Chan. The ballet, set to Ravel, has a sultry sensibility in which the female lead is gradually possessed by the music. 'Temperament!' Farrell called out more than once to get Afanasenkov into the right state of mind. Last year, when Afanasenkov was first rehearsing the ballet, Farrell would tell her to 'dance in red for 'Errante,'' Afanasenkov said, who added that the role felt outside her comfort zone. 'I've never really done anything that fiery.' 'Errante' starts out with a slow walk to a violin solo that builds in rhythmic complexity. 'It's not even a step. It's just walking out, but it feels so revealing,' Afanasenkov said. 'You're the only one on the stage. And you're just walking, and you already have to bring so much emotionally and character wise to that simple walk. If you're not confident in who you are at that moment, it's so clear that you're not and she sees it, too. She just goes, 'No.'' That usually means it's time to start over. 'I was a little bit anxious,' Afanasenkov said, 'and I started going before the music, and she was like, 'You're not listening, you're not reacting to the music.'' In the studio, Farrell would watch the dancers from the front, calling out directions while her feet, still dancing, tapped the floor. Many times, her voice stretched counts into musical notes singing them as a way to imprint the accents into the dancers' minds and bodies. During the 'Chaconne' rehearsal, she held LaFreniere's hands while counting. 'What a special experience to hold Suzanne's hands and truly feel in her bones what it was and what it should be,' LaFreniere said. A big moment came on the first day in the studio when LaFreniere and Walker were rehearsing the pas de deux that opens 'Chaconne.' Set to ballet music from Gluck's opera 'Orfeo and Euridice,' the ballet was first performed in a 1963 Hamburg State Opera production. For the City Ballet premiere, Balanchine added a new pas de deux, a seamless and shimmering duet that begins with a simple walk to the opera's 'Dance of the Blessed Spirits.' He choreographed it fast, between a matinee and an evening performance. Farrell asked LaFreniere what she was thinking as she crossed the stage. 'Heaven,' she said. When Farrell came in the next day, she said, ''I don't think you should be thinking about heaven,'' LaFreniere recalled. 'She said, 'Actually it's about Orpheus, it's the underworld.'' That changed everything. LaFreniere shifted her focus downward. 'Everything needed to be a lot quieter, a lot calmer, a lot more grounded,' she said. Farrell said that she doesn't like to jump on dancers too soon. She tries to see how they will develop their performance or characterization. 'And then I thought, no, you're not in heaven,' she said. 'Not that there's a story, but there has to be drama. You have that beautiful music, and you can feel the pathos of the music, and then they walk in and they just pass. They miss each other, like so many things in life. It's so bittersweet.' Later, a second pas de deux is full of the kind of classical dancing that transcends time. It is, in her words, 'Just totally different,' she said, punctuating her next thought with a delighted laugh: 'That would be more heaven.'
New York Times
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
This Young Virtuoso Now Has the X Factor: Nobility
When Roman Mejia found out he would be dancing 'Apollo,' the oldest work in New York City Ballet's repertory, he knew where to turn for god guidance. A dancer who does his homework — he is, he says, 'such a bunhead' — Mejia had a plan, or a man, in mind: Jacques d'Amboise, a family friend and an athletic, unruly Apollo from the 1950s and '60s whose performances he studied on video, would lead the way. 'His approach was just so raw,' Mejia said after a run-through of the ballet in advance of his debut. 'Essentially at the beginning of the ballet, he is just learning how to become a god. And these muses are here to teach him how to progress and how to get there. So you really see from the beginning that he's almost weak on his feet, trying to figure out things — some things work, some things don't. He gets frustrated.' The fervor of youth? Mejia, 25, has always had that down. But over the last couple of seasons, he has begun to tap into a more understated refinement, which was indelibly clear in his first 'Apollo,' on Tuesday night at Lincoln Center. Mejia went from an unfinished boy to a refined god with the help of his three muses (Unity Phelan, Dominika Afanasenkov and Ashley Hod). He was raw, yes, but also guileless. This was a sincere, musical Apollo — full of heat and strength, but also youthful and unaffected, impulsive and curious. Mejia's control was in the way that he linked the steps with emotions, giving both a logic, a fluidity. Mejia may have muscles — he is, as they say, ripped — but he doesn't muscle his way through steps. Mejia is an airborne dancer whose exuberance shines in joyful Balanchine ballets like 'Stars and Stripes,' 'Rubies' and 'Western Symphony.' But his repertoire, especially in recent seasons, has expanded to roles that require him to be more subtle, more sophisticated. His bravura side is still firmly in place, yet it is buoyed now by a growing sophistication. Mejia, who grew up in Fort Worth, saw 'Apollo' for the first time when he was 3. It might seem unusual that such a young child would fall for such an dramatic yet unadorned Balanchine ballet with music by Stravinsky, but there he was, a toddler, performing the choreography at home. 'My dad has stories of me going around the house just like this,' Mejia said, illustrating a striking moment from the ballet in which Apollo wraps an arm behind his back, the other raised, and opens and closes his hands like blinkers. Both of his parents were dancers — Maria Terezia Balogh and Paul Mejia, a former member of City Ballet who had staged 'Apollo' in Texas. 'At that age,' his father said, 'he would go to the ballet whenever we had a performance, and what was always amazing, whether it was 'Apollo' or whatever he saw, the next day he could duplicate it.' 'It was just uncanny,' he added. Roman was especially proud, Paul Mejia said, 'of the fact that he could do the hand behind the back and in front flashing. He thought that was a neat thing.' While on a visit to the zoo, the young Roman approached another little boy with his new skill. 'He said, 'Look, look — look at this!'' Paul said. 'And he did Apollo, and the little boy started to scream and cry. He thought he was a nut or something.' Mejia started training at 3. 'I was just so inspired by the whole idea of moving to music and taking up space,' he said. When Mejia was 9 or 10, he lost interest in ballet and took a couple of years off, playing the piano and studying taekwondo. (He excelled at that, too.) A couple years later, while in middle school at the Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts, he learned that a nearby studio needed boys for 'The Nutcracker.' 'I wasn't too crazy about dance, but I was doing it at school so I thought why not?' Mejia said. 'And that's when I really fell back in love with it again. I think it's just the aspect of performing. I really love performing.' He began training at an academy in Coppell, Texas, more than an hour away. 'I'd go with him, and he'd do his class,' Paul said. 'I didn't watch it, nothing. I wanted to stay away from the whole thing. We saw that he was not only serious, but he had a gift.' His parents decided to open a studio themselves. At 13, Roman started training at the Mejia Ballet Academy where he focused on technique and on learning variations, classical and from the Balanchine repertory. At 14, he came to New York for one of two summer sessions at the School of American Ballet, the academy that feeds into City Ballet. Before he started, he learned about his father's history at the company — and that Paul had married Suzanne Farrell, the dancer Balanchine was most enamored with. The marriage led to drama: Paul and Farrell left the company and danced in Europe. But while Farrell eventually made her way back to City Ballet, Paul did not. 'My sister always said, 'Oh, you know, our father was married to Suzanne Farrell,'' Mejia said. 'And I was like: 'No he wasn't. That's crazy.' And she's like, 'Oh yeah, it was all over the internet.'' (A family friend confirmed it at the dinner table one night. 'My sister was, like, 'I told you so,'' he said.) Once Mejia was serious about studying at the School of American Ballet, his father 'sat down with me and kind of gave me the rundown of everything,' he said. There is more family history at the school: Both of his parents studied there along with his paternal grandmother, Romana Kryzanowska, a protégé of Joseph Pilates. Mejia is named after her father, the Detroit artist Roman Kryzanowska. D'Amboise was the reason Mejia ended up at City Ballet. At one point Mejia found himself with an offer to join Boston Ballet or to continue at the school. D'Amboise voted for New York. In 2017, Mejia joined the corps de ballet and was promoted to soloist in 2021. Two years later he became a principal dancer. In the fall of 2023, he performed his first lead in a full-length ballet as a principal: Franz, the male lead in 'Coppélia.' Franz is a comic role with virtuosic elements — Mejia trademarks — but what was most revealing about his performance was the warmth and assurance with which he held the stage, especially in the classical third act. Last winter, performing opposite Tiler Peck — his fiancée — he made his debut as Siegfried in 'Swan Lake' and, again, showed a more nuanced side of his dancing, more grounded and understated. He showed that he could be a prince. For Siegfried, Mejia worked with Gonzalo Garcia, a former principal who is now a repertory director at City Ballet, and Isabelle Guérin, a former Paris Opera Ballet étoile. She showed him, he said, that 'I don't have to always punch things to make them effective.' Garcia, who works frequently with Mejia, was proud of his Siegfried. 'I think becoming that kind of dancer, a noble dancer, can take sometimes a few tries,' he said. 'But from the moment we started until he did his first shows, I was blown away. He understood it.' It has become increasingly apparent that, however thrilling, Mejia has more to offer than virtuosity. This season, he makes his debut in Jerome Robbins's elegant, folk-infused 'A Suite of Dances,' created for Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1994; later he'll take on Balanchine's 'Divertimento from 'Le Baiser de la Fée.'' 'It's fiendishly hard,' he said of 'Baiser.' 'I didn't realize. And it's not bravura at all. That solo is long.' But Mejia, Garcia said, 'never whines' and 'never seems upset, which is kind of amazing.' Mejia got only one crack at 'Apollo' this time around. That was fine. When he describes himself as feeling 'over the moon' — a recurrent Mejia line — he means it. 'I'm ready to be pushed in this new way of not just nuanced work, but telling a story,' he said. 'Apollo is bravura, but a lot of it is so subtle and it's not so in your face. I'm starting to figure out where to play with things now.' When the curtain went up on 'Apollo,' his nerves kicked in, but the music calmed him down. 'I felt so comfortable and at home,' he said. 'It was quite something to perform, and I just feel really lucky that I was able to experience that at this point. Obviously, I feel like here's still more to do and more to grow in it. But in the moment it just felt so right.'
Boston Globe
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, sinuous ballet dancer and choreographer, dies at 82
He had worked briefly with George Balanchine, the co-founder and principal choreographer of City Ballet, at the Paris Opera in 1963, when the company performed Balanchine's 'The Four Temperaments.' Six years later, Balanchine asked Mr. Bonnefoux to replace an injured dancer in the title role of 'Apollo,' which he was staging at the German Opera Ballet in Berlin. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The four days Mr. Bonnefoux spent with Balanchine, who coached him in the role, were life-changing. 'It gave me the strength to go through 10 more years of dancing,' he told Barbara Newman in an interview for her 1982 book, 'Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing.' Advertisement Knowing that 'someone like that exists somewhere,' he said, gave him a goal: 'You need to be amazed all the time, to be fresh, to be interested always.' Mr. Bonnefoux had an additional reason for wanting to join City Ballet. During a guest appearance at a gala with the Eglevsky Ballet on Long Island in 1968, he had fallen for McBride. It was 'love at first sight,' McBride said. 'I had never met anyone like him.' They married in 1973. Advertisement Over his 10-year career with City Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux performed in a wide range of works, by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and other choreographers, which showcased his pure classical technique as well as his aptitude for contemporary movement. 'He was so beautiful physically,' Jean-Pierre Frohlich, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet, said in an interview. 'He had a look that was very different to the dancers here, very sophisticated and elegant.' Although not considered a virtuoso dancer, Mr. Bonnefoux brought a sinuous grace and power to his roles, as well as a sharp theatrical intelligence. 'Mr. Bonnefous shaped the role with a cursive styling that suggested a Japanese woodcut,' Don McDonagh of The New York Times wrote of his performance in Balanchine's 'Bugaku' in 1975. 'He was powerful, but with the litheness of a large cat rather than a blunt muscularity.' Balanchine created roles for Mr. Bonnefoux in 'Stravinsky Violin Concerto' (1972), 'Cortège Hongrois' (1973), 'Sonatine' (1975), 'Union Jack' (1976), 'Étude for Piano' (1977), 'Vienna Waltzes' (1977), and 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (1979); Robbins created roles for him in 'A Beethoven Pas de Deux' (1973), later known as 'Four Bagatelles,' and 'An Evening's Waltzes' (1973). In 1977, after noticing that there were no dedicated classes for young boys at the School of American Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux approached Balanchine about teaching there. 'I wanted the young ones here to feel right away like male dancers and understand the technical differences,' he told the Times. That same year, he tore all the ligaments in an ankle while performing. During the enforced rest period that followed, encouraged by Balanchine, he began to choreograph. Advertisement In 1978, he created 'Pas Degas' as part of City Ballet's French-themed evening 'Tricolore.' That year, he also created 'Quadrille' for students at the School of American Ballet and 'Une Nuit a Lisbonne' for the Syracuse Ballet. 'This strange time, when it was supposed to be the end for me,' Mr. Bonnefoux told the Times, 'was finally maybe the richest part of my life.' Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and his twin sister, Dominique, were born April 9, 1943, in Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, to Marie Therèse (Bouhy) Bonnefoux and Laurent Bonnefoux, a tax adviser. A few years later, the family moved to Paris, where the twins began to take dance classes. Jean-Pierre's teacher suggested that he audition for the Paris Opera Ballet School. While studying there, he also pursued acting, appearing in 'Les Fruits Sauvages' (1954), 'Les Diaboliques' (1955), 'Les Carottes Sont Cuites' (1956) and other films. In 1957, at 14, he joined the Paris Opera Ballet. He moved quickly through the ranks of the company, performing lead roles in 19th-century classics 'Swan Lake,' 'Giselle,' and 'Sleeping Beauty,' as well as in ballets by Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. Mr. Bonnefoux danced as a guest artist with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Kirov Ballet. He also befriended Rudolf Nureyev and played a part in the Russian dancer's dramatic defection at Paris' Le Bourget airport in 1961. (He telephoned Nureyev's friend Clara Saint to warn her ahead of time that Nureyev was being sent back to Moscow, rather than going on to London with the rest of the Kirov company.) Advertisement But, frustrated by mediocre ballets and infrequent performances at the Paris Opera -- and inspired by Balanchine -- Mr. Bonnefoux decided to leave for City Ballet. Gradually, he absorbed City Ballet style. It was not, he told Newman, 'so much a way of moving; it was more about the contact with the music, how you almost precede the music.' Mr. Bonnefoux retired from City Ballet in 1980. He took the position of ballet master and choreographer at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and then moved to Bloomington to become head of the dance department at Indiana University. In 1983, he began to run a summer ballet program at the Chautauqua Institution, a gated arts community in the northwestern corner of New York state and the site of the oldest summer arts festival in North America. He brought in prestigious City Ballet alumni including McBride and Violette Verdy to stage Balanchine pieces, formed a professional summer company, and invited a broad variety of choreographers to work with the dancers. 'He was such a good teacher, and he and Patti were a formidable team in Chautauqua,' said Christine Redpath, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet. 'That beautiful French training really fed into his teaching.' By the time he stepped down in 2021, Mr. Bonnefoux had transformed the summer program into one of the country's most coveted destinations for aspiring dancers. 'He had a quiet presence, but behind his soft accent there was clarity, detail, precision and, always, encouragement,' said Daniel Ulbricht, a City Ballet principal. In 1996, Mr. Bonnefoux became the artistic director of what was then called North Carolina Dance Theater, in Charlotte, with McBride as associate artistic director. He remained there until 2017, and the couple transformed the company into a strong classical troupe that was also a vibrant home for contemporary choreography, adding works by Dwight Rhoden, Alonzo King, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, and William Forsythe to the repertoire. Advertisement Mr. Bonnefoux choreographed, too: His ballets included 'Carmina Burana' and versions of 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Cinderella,' and 'The Nutcracker.' In 2010, the company opened the Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance, housing its rehearsal and administrative spaces as well as a 200-seat theater. Four years later, the company was renamed Charlotte Ballet. McBride and Mr. Bonnefoux divorced in 2018, but remained close. He leaves their children, Christopher and Melanie (Bonnefoux) DeCoudres, and three grandchildren. Mr. Bonnefoux's qualities as a director and a teacher were transformative, said Sasha Janes, a former Charlotte Ballet dancer who succeeded him as director of the School of Dance at Chautauqua. 'He could see things in people they couldn't see in themselves,' Janes said. 'He wasn't interested in cookie-cutter perfect dancers; he wanted to see humanity on stage.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Sinuous Ballet Dancer and Choreographer, Dies at 82
Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, a star dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet and an elegantly refined principal dancer at New York City Ballet who later nurtured generations of dancers as a teacher and as the director of the Charlotte Ballet, died on April 13 in Charlotte, N.C. He was 82. His ex-wife, the former City Ballet ballerina Patricia McBride, said the cause of his death, at an assisted-living facility, was heart failure. Mr. Bonnefoux (pronounced bon-FOO) — or Bonnefous, the name he used professionally during his dancing career — had been an étoile (the word means 'star') at the Paris Opera Ballet for five years when, at 27, he joined City Ballet as a principal dancer in 1970. He had worked briefly with George Balanchine, the co-founder and principal choreographer of City Ballet, at the Paris Opera in 1963, when the company performed Balanchine's 'The Four Temperaments.' Six years later, Balanchine asked Mr. Bonnefoux to replace an injured dancer in the title role of 'Apollo,' which he was staging at the German Opera Ballet in Berlin. The four days Mr. Bonnefoux spent with Balanchine, who coached him in the role, were life-changing. 'It gave me the strength to go through 10 more years of dancing,' he told Barbara Newman in an interview for her 1982 book, 'Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing.' Knowing that 'someone like that exists somewhere,' he said, gave him a goal: 'You need to be amazed all the time, to be fresh, to be interested always.' Mr. Bonnefoux had an additional reason for wanting to join City Ballet. During a guest appearance at a gala with the Eglevsky Ballet on Long Island in 1968, he had fallen for Ms. McBride. It was 'love at first sight,' Ms. McBride said. 'I had never met anyone like him.' They married in 1973. Over his 10-year career with City Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux performed in a wide range of works, by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and other choreographers, which showcased his pure classical technique as well as his aptitude for contemporary movement. 'He was so beautiful physically,' Jean-Pierre Frohlich, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet, said in an interview. 'He had a look that was very different to the dancers here, very sophisticated and elegant.' Although not considered a virtuoso dancer, Mr. Bonnefoux brought a sinuous grace and power to his roles, as well as a sharp theatrical intelligence. 'Mr. Bonnefous shaped the role with a cursive styling that suggested a Japanese woodcut,' Don McDonagh of The New York Times wrote of his performance in Balanchine's 'Bugaku' in 1975. 'He was powerful, but with the litheness of a large cat rather than a blunt muscularity.' Mr. McDonagh added that his reading of the role 'gave it a tactile grace that one sees in well‐formed sculpture.' Balanchine created roles for Mr. Bonnefoux in 'Stravinsky Violin Concerto' (1972), 'Cortège Hongrois' (1973), 'Sonatine' (1975), 'Union Jack' (1976), 'Étude for Piano' (1977), 'Vienna Waltzes' (1977) and 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (1979); Robbins created roles for him in 'A Beethoven Pas de Deux' (1973), later known as 'Four Bagatelles,' and 'An Evening's Waltzes' (1973). In 1977, after noticing that there were no dedicated classes for young boys at the School of American Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux approached Balanchine about teaching there. 'I wanted the young ones here to feel right away like male dancers and understand the technical differences,' he told The Times. That same year, he tore all the ligaments in an ankle while performing. During the enforced rest period that followed, encouraged by Balanchine, he began to choreograph. In 1978, he created 'Pas Degas' as part of City Ballet's French-themed evening 'Tricolore.' ('I have a few things I will have to tell you for your next ballet,' Balanchine remarked after the premiere.) That year, he also created 'Quadrille' for students at the School of American Ballet and 'Une Nuit a Lisbonne' for the Syracuse Ballet. 'This strange time, when it was supposed to be the end for me,' Mr. Bonnefoux told The Times, 'was finally maybe the richest part of my life.' Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and his twin sister, Dominique, were born on April 9, 1943, in Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, to Marie Therèse (Bouhy) Bonnefoux and Laurent Bonnefoux, a tax adviser. A few years later, the family moved to Paris, where the twins began to take dance classes. Jean-Pierre's teacher suggested that he audition for the Paris Opera Ballet School. While studying there, he also pursued acting, appearing in 'Les Fruits Sauvages' (1954), 'Les Diaboliques' (1955), 'Les Carottes Sont Cuites' (1956) and other films. 'At one point, I really didn't know what to do between dance and acting,' he told Ms. Newman. His parents consulted 'an Indian man, a Hindu, one who could see the future,' he recalled. 'He said very good things about what I would do in ballet.' In 1957, at 14, he joined the Paris Opera Ballet, then directed by Serge Lifar, a Kyiv-born former star of the Ballets Russes. He disliked Lifar's ballets but loved his teachers, Gérard Mulys, Raymond Franchetti and Serge Peretti, whose examples would later give him a foundation for teaching. He moved quickly through the ranks of the company, becoming an étoile at 21 and performing lead roles in 19th-century classics like 'Swan Lake,' 'Giselle' and 'Sleeping Beauty,' as well as in ballets by Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. (Étoile is the only title at the Paris Opera that is bestowed at the discretion of the management.) Mr. Bonnefoux danced as a guest artist with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Kirov Ballet. He also befriended Rudolf Nureyev and played a part in the Russian dancer's dramatic defection at Paris's Le Bourget airport in 1961. (He telephoned Nureyev's friend Clara Saint to warn her ahead of time that Nureyev was being sent back to Moscow, rather than going on to London with the rest of the Kirov company.) But, frustrated by mediocre ballets and infrequent performances at the Paris Opera — and inspired by Balanchine — Mr. Bonnefoux decided to leave for City Ballet. Gradually, he absorbed City Ballet style. It was not, he told Ms. Newman, 'so much a way of moving; it was more about the contact with the music, how you almost precede the music.' Mr. Bonnefoux retired from City Ballet in 1980. He took the position of ballet master and choreographer at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and then moved to Bloomington, Ind., to become head of the dance department at Indiana University. In 1983, he began to run a summer ballet program at the Chautauqua Institution, a gated arts community in the northwestern corner of New York State and the site of the oldest summer arts festival in North America. He brought in prestigious City Ballet alumni like Ms. McBride and Violette Verdy to stage Balanchine pieces, formed a professional summer company and invited a broad variety of choreographers to work with the dancers. 'He was such a good teacher, and he and Patti were a formidable team in Chautauqua,' said Christine Redpath, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet. 'That beautiful French training really fed into his teaching.' By the time he stepped down in 2021, Mr. Bonnefoux had transformed the summer program into one of the country's most coveted destinations for aspiring dancers. 'He had a quiet presence, but behind his soft accent there was clarity, detail, precision and, always, encouragement,' said Daniel Ulbricht, a City Ballet principal. 'He was part of the reason why I, and many other dancers, were ready to make that commitment to pursuing a career.' In 1996, Mr. Bonnefoux became the artistic director of what was then called North Carolina Dance Theater, in Charlotte, with Ms. McBride as associate artistic director. He remained there until 2017, and the couple transformed the company into a strong classical troupe that was also a vibrant home for contemporary choreography, adding works by Dwight Rhoden, Alonzo King, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and William Forsythe to the repertoire, as well staging pieces by Balanchine and Robbins. Mr. Bonnefoux choreographed, too: His ballets included 'Carmina Burana,' 'Peter Pan' and versions of 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Cinderella' and 'The Nutcracker.' In 2010, the company opened the Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance, housing its rehearsal and administrative spaces as well as a 200-seat theater. Four years later, the company was renamed Charlotte Ballet. Ms. McBride and Mr. Bonnefoux divorced in 2018, but remained close. He is survived by their children, Christopher Bonnefoux and Melanie (Bonnefoux) DeCoudres, and three grandchildren. Mr. Bonnefoux's qualities as a director and a teacher were transformative, said Sasha Janes, a former Charlotte Ballet dancer who succeeded Mr. Bonnefoux as director of the School of Dance at Chautauqua. 'He could see things in people they couldn't see in themselves,' Mr. Janes said, adding that Mr. Bonnefoux was ahead of his time: 'He wasn't interested in cookie-cutter perfect dancers; he wanted to see humanity on stage.'
