Willam F. Christensen, 99; Ballet Pioneer

Willam Farr Christensen, a tireless, pioneer American dancer, choreographer, company director and teacher, died Sunday in Salt Lake City. He was 99.

Christensen was the last of three brothers--the others being Lew and Harold--who established a ballet tradition in the American West.

“The man is a legend,” said Jonas Kage, artistic director of Ballet West, a company in Utah that Christensen founded. “He and his brothers put ballet on the map in America.”

They also introduced works that are now part of virtually every company’s repertory. Take “The Nutcracker.” Christensen once said that the secret to choreographing it was in the music: “If you just listen, it’s all there.” And he wasn’t just guessing: He created the first full-length “Nutcracker” in America--for San Francisco Ballet in 1944--along with the first professional full-length American stagings of “Swan Lake” and “Coppelia.”

But if others considered him a visionary, he spoke of himself in more down-to-earth terms. “I guess if you consider working with dance for 50 years a success, I’m a success,” he told the San Francisco Examiner in 1978.

And, whatever his accomplishments offstage, he always missed performing. When the University of Utah revived his version of “Coppelia” in 1997, he told the Salt Lake Tribune that he wished he could dance it again. “My brother, Lew, could do more pirouettes,” he said, “but I beat the hell out of him in mime.”

He was born William Farr Christensen in Brigham City, Utah, on Aug. 27, 1902, and as a child studied dance with his uncle, a teacher named Lars Peter Christensen, but didn’t plan on a dance career.

After World War I, he formed a successful Dixieland jazz band, becoming a proficient drummer, but when his uncle brought ballet students from Salt Lake City to perform in Brigham City, he fell in love with ballet--although as he told the Deseret News in 1996, “at the time I thought I was falling in love with the pretty little girl dancers.”

After further ballet studies in New York, he toured the famous Orpheum vaudeville circuit with his brothers and various partners in the 1920s, performing hyper-athletic ballet routines across the country and adopting a number of foreign-sounding names because it was good for business. William became Willam somewhere in this period.

Although their routines put a premium on accessible technical flash, a 1931 review in Billboard noted that “Christensen Brothers are taking a chance in trying to sell an act composed entirely of classical dancing.”

In the mid-1930s, the Christensens left vaudeville, with Lew gaining fame as a dancer for choreographer George Balanchine shortly after he emigrated from Europe to New York, and Willam opening a ballet school in Portland, Ore., in 1932, which quickly evolved into the Portland Ballet.

In 1937, he joined the San Francisco Opera as a principal dancer and, within a year, became ballet master, the head dance job in the company. While Harold danced in the performances and took over the opera’s ballet school, Willam began staging full-length classics.

“I’d never seen ‘Swan Lake,’ ” he told Newsweek in 1993, “only the second act. But there was a big Russian colony here [in San Francisco] and those Russian officers were from old noble families. They remembered everything.”

When the opera disbanded its ballet wing at the start of World War II, Willam and Harold bought the rights to the school and company from the board and in 1942 founded the San Francisco Ballet, the first major classical company in the West. Lew joined them in 1951 and became sole artistic director a year later.

Meanwhile, Christensen had renewed his ties to his home state. In 1951, he accepted a position at the University of Utah, in part to provide a more stable living environment for his ailing wife, Mignon, who had been his partner in vaudeville. The following year he founded a ballet department that, in typical Christensen fashion, grew until it became professionalized as Ballet West in 1968. He remained artistic director of the company through 1978 and thereafter ran the Christensen Ballet Academy.

In 1973, the three brothers won the annual Dance Magazine Award (sharing it with Rudolf Nureyev), and Willam won a number of teaching awards starting in the 1960s. Lew Christensen died in 1984, Harold Christensen in 1989, but elder brother Willam continued to inspire generations of ballet students.

One of those students was Kent Stowell, who followed in Christensen’s footsteps by starting his ballet career in Utah, then moving to San Francisco Ballet and, after a stint at New York City Ballet, taking over Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle with his wife, Francia Russell.

He met Christensen in 1954, a time when, he told The Times on Monday, “to get boys to dance ballet in America was really remarkable. But Bill was always encouraging about male dancers. He’d horse around with us in the studio and generated the sense that to be a ballet dancer was OK.”

Stowell said Christensen also served as a role model when he became an artistic director. “What Bill did was create in people’s minds that in order to establish an [arts] organization, you had to be an enthusiastic spokesperson for your profession,” he said. “Watching him be a good promoter taught me how to marshal community support.”

Most of all, Stowell remembers Christensen as “loving life. He loved to have a good drink, a cigarette, a laugh with people. He was a theater person, an opera and a ballet person. And to live as long as he did, he must have enjoyed a lot of it.”