Barbara Milberg

Barbara Anne Milberg Fisher (November 6, 1931 – May 31, 2020) was an American dancer, academic, and author. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Ukrainian Jewish immigrant parents — her father a dentist, her mother a hygienist — she grew up alongside an older brother, David. Having survived both dysentery and pneumonia by age six, she was enrolled in ballet lessons by her parents to strengthen her health. Those early classes, taken with a teacher she knew only as "Selma," led to enrollment at the School of American Ballet (SAB), where her instructors included Pierre Vladimiroff, Muriel Stuart, Anatole Oboukhov, and Felia Doubrovska. Alongside her dance training, she studied classical piano from childhood and, in the early 1940s, began working with teacher Dorothy Taubman, who prepared her for admission to New York's High School of Music and Art.

In 1946, at the age of fourteen, Milberg was invited by George Balanchine to join Ballet Society, the organization he had co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein. Her first performance there was in the corps de ballet of Balanchine's Symphonie Concertante. When Ballet Society evolved into the New York City Ballet (NYCB), Milberg remained with the company for twelve years, rising from corps de ballet to soloist. During that time she traveled on five extended European tours and three national American tours, and performed at the company's regular seasons at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York. Among her principal roles was "Profane Love" in Frederick Ashton's Illuminations, a part originally choreographed for Melissa Hayden, and a role in Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake. She appeared in Balanchine's 1948 Orpheus, first as a Fury and later promoted to Bacchante, and performed in the 1954 Arnold Schoenberg ballet Opus 34. As a soloist, she danced in the 1955 Georges Bizet ballet Roma and was one of the principal dancers in the 1956 Divertimento No. 15. In the 1957 Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration Agon, she performed the Gailliard duet with Barbara Walczak, which proved to be the last new Balanchine ballet she performed with the company. She also played Leto in the 1951 revival of Balanchine's Apollo and appeared as one of the three Ladies of the Night in Balanchine's choreography for NBC Opera Theatre's televised 1956 production of The Magic Flute. In 1955, at Balanchine's invitation, she served as co-choreographer, alongside Balanchine and NYCB principal Francisco Moncion, of the company's production of Bizet's Jeux d'Enfants. When not performing, she served as page-turner for Balanchine's rehearsal pianist Nicholas Kopeikine.

Milberg's association with Jerome Robbins began as early as 1949, when he cast her in The Guests, his first ballet for NYCB. In 1958, shortly after her marriage, Robbins invited her to join his newly formed Ballets: USA as a principal dancer. The company opened Gian-Carlo Menotti's inaugural Spoleto Festival that year and performed extensively in Europe, including in Athens and Dubrovnik. Milberg's repertory with Ballets: USA included The Butterfly in Robbins's 1956 comic work The Concert and the female lead in his pas de deux Afternoon of a Faun, both roles originally created for Tanaquil LeClercq. On April 11, 1962, she was among the Ballets: USA dancers who performed for President John F. Kennedy and his wife at the White House — the first ballet company to do so — a performance that marked the conclusion of her dancing career.

Her Broadway appearances occurred between 1953 and 1961. She starred in The Concert and also appeared in The Merchant of Venice.

In the mid-1970s, Milberg Fisher pursued higher education, earning her B.A. and M.A. before receiving her doctorate in 1980 from the Graduate School of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her teaching career had begun in 1974 as a Graduate Fellow at Queens College, CUNY, followed by two years at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. She subsequently joined the English faculty at City College of CUNY, where she taught at both graduate and undergraduate levels, designed new courses, served on the Executive, Library, and Literature Committees, directed the department's English Honors Program, and judged entries for the annual English Awards Convocation. She retired in 2003 as a full professor, having taught at City College for 29 years, and held the title of professor emerita of English. As president of the Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1998, she organized guest speakers for semi-annual meetings, including dance critic Arlene Croce of The New Yorker.

Fisher published several books across her fields of expertise. In 2006, Wesleyan University Press published her memoir In Balanchine's Company: A Dancer's Memoir, which was among the first books by a Balanchine-and-Robbins dancer to document in detail the period of Ballet Society and the earliest years of NYCB. The New York Times dance critic Jack Anderson reviewed it favorably. Her scholarly publications include Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous (University Press of Virginia, 1990) and Noble Numbers, Subtle Words: The Art of Mathematics in the Science of Storytelling (Fairleigh Dickinson and Associated University Presses, 1997), the latter of which was nominated for a Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science and examined mathematical concepts in works by authors including Shakespeare, Milton, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Toni Morrison. She also contributed an essay on Wallace Stevens to Oxford's multi-volume American National Biography, and her shorter writings appeared in publications including the Wallace Stevens Journal, Virginia Review, Bucknell Review, the American Book Review, and Dance Chronicle.

In 1957, Milberg married Howard Shreve Fisher III. The couple had three children — Alexandra Childs, born 1961; Benji Nichols, born 1963; and Samuel Barber, born 1969 — and divorced in 1967. She had two grandchildren, Alice, born 1992, and Leonard, born 1994. Barbara Milberg Fisher died on May 31, 2020, at the age of 88.