Todd Bolender

Todd Bolender, born February 27, 1914, in Canton, Ohio, was a ballet dancer, choreographer, teacher, and director whose career spanned more than three decades on stage and extended further still through his work as an educator and company leader. He died on October 12, 2006, at the age of 92, from complications related to a stroke.

Bolender grew up in a household where music and theater held a central place, and as the most physically energetic of four children he was steered early into acrobatic tap lessons. At seventeen, in 1931, he traveled to New York to study theatrical dance, describing the city in a 2002 interview as a kind of heaven. He settled there permanently in 1933, arriving at roughly the same moment George Balanchine came to the United States. An encounter with a performance by Mary Wigman drew him to the teaching of Hanya Holm, and social acquaintance with Balanchine led him to enroll at the School of American Ballet, where his instructors included Pierre Vladimiroff, Felia Dubrovska, Anatole Oboukhoff, and Ludmilla Schollar. He also trained with Muriel Stuart and pursued modern dance through study with Louis Horst and Harald Kreutzberg. Bolender later identified Wigman, Uday Shankar, and Kreutzberg as the two greatest influences on his choreographic thinking. Asked why he ultimately committed to ballet, he offered a straightforward answer: it was the Depression and he needed a job.

His performing career ran from 1936 to 1972, when he appeared onstage for the final time at New York City Ballet's Stravinsky Festival, for which he also choreographed Serenade in A and Piano-Rag-Music. He was a member of every organizational iteration of the company that became New York City Ballet, and he additionally danced with the Littlefield Ballet in the late 1930s, performing in Catherine Littlefield's Barn Dance and the first American production of Sleeping Beauty. He spent four months with Ballet Theatre in 1944 before an injury interrupted that engagement, and he performed with Les Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo for the 1945–46 season. Among the roles he originated were the State Trooper in Lew Christensen's Filling Station, Alias in Billy the Kid, and parts in Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, Renard, and Agon, as well as in numerous works by Jerome Robbins. Critic and historian Doris Hering described him in the International Dictionary of the Ballet as a superb comedian with a penchant for high camp, and longtime New York City Ballet observer Robert Garis wrote of his performance in Agon that his easy wit and charm in the first pas de trois seemed unrecapturable.

Alongside his ballet career, Bolender appeared on Broadway between 1937 and 1958, accumulating credits that included Helen Goes to Troy, Frederika, Miss Pocahontas, Rosalinda, and The Concert. His Broadway work reflected the same versatility that defined his stage presence across genres.

Bolender created his first ballet, Mother Goose Suite, in 1943, and went on to make approximately three dozen works over the course of his career, eleven of them for New York City Ballet. His choreography entered the repertoires of Kansas City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, The Joffrey Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His two best-known ballets, Souvenirs and The Still Point, were both made in 1955 and remained in active repertoire. Beyond ballet companies, he choreographed for musical theater, opera, and television, beginning in 1952 with Time Remembered for Albi Marre Productions. In 1969 he choreographed The Conquering Hero, followed by Cry for Us All in 1970. During his time working in Turkey in the 1970s, he choreographed productions of My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha, and Showboat. In Kansas City he choreographed for numerous operas, among them Samson and Delilah. His career brought him into working relationships with Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Samuel Barber.

Bolender's administrative career included serving as ballet director of the Cologne Opera House from 1963 to 1966 and in the same capacity in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1969. In 1975 he co-founded Pacific Northwest Ballet with Janet Reed, and from 1977 he spent three years as ballet director at the Atatürk Opera House in Turkey. In the winter of 1981 he became artistic director of Kansas City Ballet, a position he held until 1995, building the company, its repertoire, and its school. He became Artistic Director Emeritus in 1996 when William Whitener succeeded him.

In the fall of 1997, the George Balanchine Foundation invited Bolender to New York to document on videotape the solo Balanchine had created for him in The Four Temperaments. He had originated the role of the Fox in the 1947 premiere of Renard, and in 2001 he reconstructed that work for Kansas City Ballet after it had been absent from the repertoire for roughly half a century. He continued coaching dancers in Balanchine roles for the Balanchine Foundation's Film Archive as part of his ongoing commitment to preserving that choreographic legacy. In 2006 he was awarded the Dance Magazine Award for lifetime achievement in dance, though he died just weeks before he was to receive it. The Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity, which became the home of Kansas City Ballet and its school, opened on August 26, 2011. Kansas City Ballet performed its final Nutcracker featuring Bolender's choreography during the 2014 winter season, concluding thirty-four years of that production.