William Dollar

William Dollar (April 20, 1907 – February 28, 1986) was an American dancer, choreographer, ballet master, and teacher who became one of the first American danseurs nobles. Born William Henry Dollar in St. Louis, Missouri, he grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, where his family operated a grocery store and meat market. As a boy, Dollar studied piano and gymnastics, excelling at the latter, while developing a strong desire to pursue ballet training. His parents initially discouraged this ambition, but he eventually persuaded them and began formal dance study in his mid-teens. After working with local teachers, he traveled east to train with Catherine Littlefield in Philadelphia and subsequently with Mikhail Mordkin, Alexandre Volinine, and Michel Fokine in New York. By 1934, when he took his first class with George Balanchine at the newly founded School of American Ballet, he was already a technically accomplished dancer.

Dollar's professional career encompassed performance, choreography, and teaching across several major companies, including the Philadelphia Opera Ballet, the American Ballet, Ballet Caravan, Ballet Society, Ballet Theatre, and New York City Ballet. When Balanchine, Lincoln Kirstein, and Edward M.M. Warburg established the American Ballet in 1935, Dollar joined as a soloist and quickly advanced to principal roles. At the company's inaugural New York season in March 1935 at the Adelphi Theater, he appeared in six of the seven Balanchine ballets presented. Among these was Alma Mater, set to a commissioned score by Kay Swift and orchestrated by Morton Gould, a fantasy satire of 1920s college life in which Dollar played both the Villain, opposite Charles Laskey and Gisella Caccialanza, and the Janitor. He also danced the principal male role in Serenade, performed a pas de trois in Reminiscence with Holly Howard and Elise Rieman, and took the role of The Man in Black in Transcendence — a Mephistophelian character Balanchine created specifically for him. Additional roles that season included the Wanderer in L'Errante and the Acrobat in Dreams.

Balanchine continued to create significant roles for Dollar throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1937, Dollar originated the Joker in The Card Party and the Bridegroom in Le Baiser de la Fée, both set to music by Igor Stravinsky. That same year, Balanchine and the American Ballet were engaged by Samuel Goldwyn to create dances for the United Artists film The Goldwyn Follies, released in 1938. Dollar served as partner to Vera Zorina in two Balanchine ballets featured in the film: the Romeo and Juliet Ballet, set to music by George Gershwin, and the Water Nymph Ballet, set to music by Vernon Duke. In 1941, Dollar partnered Marie-Jeanne in both Ballet Imperial, set to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2, and Concerto Barocco, set to Bach's Double Violin Concerto in D minor — credits that also appear among his Broadway appearances, which spanned from 1928 to 1942 and included Ballet Moderne and Rosalinda in addition to those works. In 1946, he created the role of the Black Cat in The Spellbound Child, a lyric fantasy set to Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges, and later that year originated the Melancholic variation in the first movement of The Four Temperaments, set to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith. Balanchine drew on Dollar's notably pliant, arching back to extend the expressive range of the classical vocabulary in that variation.

Dollar also performed in numerous opera ballets choreographed by Balanchine between 1935 and 1942, appearing in productions of Aïda, Mignon, La Juive, The Bartered Bride, The Bat, The Fair at Sorochinsk, The Queen of Spades, and Macbeth. A particularly notable opera stage credit was Balanchine's production of Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice in May 1936, presented by the American Ballet Ensemble at the Metropolitan Opera House, in which Lew Christensen danced Orpheus, Daphne Vane appeared as Eurydice, and Dollar portrayed Amor, the winged god of love. Photographs of this production by George Platt Lynes were widely published and reproduced. Dollar's classical technique — characterized by clean line, exceptional ballon, and remarkable flexibility — also made him well suited to earlier Fokine repertoire, including the Poet in Les Sylphides and Harlequin in Le Carnaval, both of which he performed with Ballet Theatre during its inaugural season in 1940.

As a choreographer, Dollar made his first work in March 1936 for the American Ballet Ensemble at the Metropolitan Opera House. In collaboration with Balanchine, he created Concerto, later known as Classic Ballet, to Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21. Dollar set the opening Maestoso, a pas de six featuring Caccialanza, and the closing Allegro Vivace, while Balanchine choreographed the middle Larghetto as a pas de trois for Dollar, Holly Howard, and Charles Laskey. Dollar restaged the work in 1944 as Constantia for Ballet International, the short-lived company founded in New York by the Marquis de Cuevas, dancing the male lead opposite Marie-Jeanne and Yvonne Patterson. He later staged it again for Ballet Theatre in 1950, where it remained in the repertory for several years.

Dollar's most widely known choreographic work, The Duel, was first mounted in 1949 as Le Combat for Roland Petit's Ballets de Paris. Drawing on an episode from Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581) and set to a score by Raffaelo de Banfield, the ballet recounts the legend of mortal combat between Tancredi, a Christian knight of Normandy, and Clorinda, a Saracen maiden disguised in male armor. Originally an extended pas de deux danced by Janine Charrat and Vladimir Skouratoff, Dollar expanded the cast to include three additional knights when he staged the work for the New York City Ballet in 1950, where Melissa Hayden appeared as Clorinda alongside Jacques d'Amboise as Tancredi. Dollar staged the ballet again for Ballet Theatre in 1953, where Lupe Serrano and John Kriza performed the leading roles.