American Ballet Theater’s Antony Tudor Dies at 79

Antony Tudor, a causal and dominating presence in the world of dance whose psychologically oriented ballets explored the darker side of the human experience, died Sunday night.

He was 79 and suffered a heart attack at his residence at the First Zen Institute of America in New York City.

The choreographer emeritus of the American Ballet Theater, whose rail-thin physique and bald pate symbolized to many the austerity of his significant but limited portfolio of dance, had a history of heart problems.

Rehearsal Saturday

But as recently as Saturday, the day before his death, he was rehearsing with the American Ballet Theater his 1975 ballet, “The Leaves Are Fading.” That and “The Tiller in the Fields,” both based on the music of Antonin Dvorak, were among his final creations.

The British-born Tudor, who moved to the United States in 1939 at the invitation of what was then the Ballet Theater, was best known for his works from the 1930s and ‘40s: “Pillar of Fire,” “Dark Elegies,” “Lilac Garden” and “Dim Lustre.”

They all celebrated his fascination with the common folk he found about him.

“I had to deal with people I knew,” he liked to say. “I didn’t know princesses and princes.”

Choreographer Agnes de Mille once put it another way:

“Antony Tudor was the first to put dancers in a ballet and dress them like his father and mother.”

“Pillar of Fire,” perhaps the best known of what were seen as his social Expressionisms punctuated by moments of pain, typified the Tudor genre. Staged in 1942, it deals with middle-class sexual frustrations in a small town.

Nora Kaye, the potential spinster Hagar in “Pillar,” who died earlier this year, once said that Tudor--who shaped her career like no other choreographer--”made the dancer become a human being on stage. The kind of beauty Tudor was after was truth.”

She also recalled the demands made on his dancers by the shadowy Tudor, an illusive figure on the dance scene who seldom attended performances of his works, “the horrible times when he was mean, even sadistic. . . . But the results were so wonderful. . . . “

His often rambling dance poems were credited with becoming the standards against which other modern dramatic ballets are judged.

Born to working parents in London as William Cook, Tudor was attracted to the arts relatively late and did not begin his dance studies until he was 19.

He began performing professionally with Marie Rambert’s company in London in the early 1930s and devised his first ballet, “Crossgarter’d,” based on the yellow stockings episode in “Twelfth Night,” in 1931. His first important work was considered “The Planets” in 1934, and he followed it with “Lilac Garden” and “Dark Elegies” in 1936 and 1937, respectively.

As a performer he found himself “proficient but not a (great) dancer.”

He left Ballet Rambert to found London Ballet, for which he choreographed “Soiree Musicale” and “Gala Performance.” In Europe he danced in most of his own productions.

He then moved to the United States to join the embryonic Ballet Theater, now the American Ballet Theater. The company, today directed by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was shaped by Lucia Chase, but it was Tudor whose choreography became synonymous with it.

He choreographed for Ballet Theater from 1939 to 1980 and was an associate director from 1974 to 1980.

Critics have grouped him with George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton as the three giants of dance in our time.

‘He Is the Conscience’

His influence extended well beyond the concert hall. Jerome Robbins said he “joined Ballet Theater because I wanted to dance in ‘Dark Elegies.’ Tudor conveyed the true movement emotions that could not be put into words.”

And Baryshnikov said recently that the American Ballet Theater is “really Tudor’s company. We perform Mr. Tudor’s ballets because we have to,” he said at a ceremony honoring the choreographer emeritus. “He is the conscience of our company.”

Tudor also had taught throughout the world, in New York at the Juilliard School of Music dance department and at such geographically contrasting points as the University of California, Irvine.

As he neared 80, his ballets were being performed all over the world and the honors customarily reserved for artists dwelling in the last light of their lives came to him. Last December he was honored at the White House as one of six recipients of Kennedy Center Honors and received the 35th annual Capezio Award.

Times critic Martin Bernheimer remembered Tudor on Monday as “a pioneer, a seminal influence, in the definition of psychological subtlety in dance.”

‘Basic Human Truths’

“His ballets probed relentlessly for basic human truths beneath conventional dramatic surfaces. On the stage, he dealt, as few others could, with the darker frailties of life and of death. He did not create as many ballets as one would have hoped and, in his later years, his influence at American Ballet Theatre seemed needlessly shadowy.

“His own ballets often tended to be oddly cast and even shabbily mounted. However, his dauntless invention, his innate musicality and his unerring sense of dramatic urgency remained palpable even in the most perfunctory revivals,” Bernheimer said.

Tudor, whose longtime companion was former dancer Hugh Laing, acknowledged his limited output, saying, “I only made a ballet when I wanted to.

“I have no thoughts about where I fit into dance history,” he told The Times last year.

“All I ever wanted to do was make a ballet good enough to be asked to do another.”