Todd Bolender, Performer/Choreographer/Director
Todd Bolender, Kansas City Ballet's Director Emeritus, passed away at the age of 92, on October 12, 2006. He had been artistic director of the KCB from 1981 to 1996. In a career that was equally distinguished as performer, choreographer, and director, Bolender, was the aristocrat of dance: versatile, meticulously tasteful, musical and master of drama and humor as he expressed in both ballet and modern dance.
His life in dance was no less dramatic, varied, or precarious. Born in Canton, Ohio, 1914, in a family where the arts, music and theater were an import part of its life, Bolender's liveliness got him enrolled in lessons in acrobatic tap. By 1931, at 17 years of age, he had found New York "a kind of heaven," and was ready to study in earnest. By 1933, he was a resident. New York in the 1930s was full of concert groups and solo performers who performed new kinds of movement, in protest to the clas-sical...modern dance. Bolender saw a concert by the German expressionist, Mary Wigman, and the powerful modern dancer, Harald Kreutzberg. Bolender studied with Hanya Holm, one of the 4 Americans, who developed their own modern dance technique, in protest to Denishawn's entertainment theatricals. He also studied with Harald Kreutzberg and with Louis Horst, the influential music teacher/composer, whose classes included choreographic structure and analysis of early music forms. According to current Kansas City Ballet artistic director, William Whitener, Bolender's greatest influences were Wigman, Kreutzberg and Uday Shankar, the mesmerizing performer of Hindu dance. The country was in the midst of the Depression, and Bolender frankly admitted that he then became a ballet dancer because he needed a job.
The '30s, as well, were formative years for ballet in America, as Lincoln Kirstein with George Balanchine formed the School of American Ballet (1934). They recruited Bolender for the American Ballet (1933) in 1935, and for Ballet Caravan (1936) where Kirstein encouraged choreography on Americana themes. Bolender's performance as "Alias," the Kid's nemesis in Eugene Loring's "Billy the Kid," in 1938, made history. Bolender studied at the School of American Ballet with Diaghilev émigrés: Pierre Vladimiroff (charming, elegant); Anatole Oboukhoff (demanding); Anatole Vilzak (musical) and Ludmilla Schollar (of prodigious memory) during their brief period at the school; with Muriel Stuart (from the Pavlova company, who taught lyricism and beautiful port de bras); and with Felia Dubrovska (a Modigliani model come to life). With the formation of Ballet Society (the precursor of New York City Ballet, 1946-1948), Bolender's performance as "Phlegmatic," in Balanchine's experimental masterwork "Four Temperaments," (1946) was inimitable. Other experimental Balanchine works "Ivesiana" (1954) and later, "Agon" (1957) found him the strong center as the dancers seemed somewhat bewildered at the unforeseeable stark trend in Balanchine's choreography. Bolender, as well, composed with a dark side as seen in his violent "The Miraculous Mandarin" 1951 to Bartok, and "Creation of the World," (1960) to music of Milaud, where he equated the fall of man to the stock market crash in 1929.
Throughout his career, dancers in NYCB would run to the wings to see him perform, no matter what the role. He drew a hypnotized audience to him as well, through his minute and incredible physical control and concentration, just as he had seen in the great solo performers of the past. His roles included comedy from the droll, in Robbins' "The Concert," and "Fanfare," to the introspective "Age of Anxiety." It was perhaps this last work that inspired Bolender to create "The Still Point" in 1955, and give a perceptive yet irreverent nod to his early background by recreating silent movie characters in his "Souvenirs." During the '50s, Bolender rehearsed his cast in his thoughtful, quiet way giving them trust to contribute to the characterizations.
NYCB's dark days were in 1956 when Balanchine's wife, Tanaquil LeClercq, contracted polio in Denmark and he remained there with her for several months. The dancers were devastated, but they returned home and NYCB continued rehearsed by Bolender and ballet mistress, Vida Brown. More dark days were ahead with the transition to the New York State Theater when no income led members of the company to seek other means of employment.
But Bolender was never without a chor-eographic, guest teaching or directorial assignment. His works have entered the repertoire of American companies, musical theater, opera and television. In the '70s he worked in Turkey restaging American musicals and in 1981, at the suggestion of Kirstein, became artistic director of the Kansas City Ballet, taking with him Ballet Society alum, Una Kai, who taught classes in the KCB School. There, he staged Balanchine's works and created new works for the company. For NYCB's 1972 Stravinsky Festival, he created two new works, and contributed to the reconstruction of "Renard" for the Balanchine Foundation Film Archive, a work in which he had appeared in 1947 and had reconstructed for KCB, as well.
When asked why he never wanted to write an autobiography, he answered "There are too many things I don't want to tell." In a life so full of challenges, it was not a surprising answer. Hopefully, someone will document the prodigious amount of his works, from all the sources he enriched.
KCB's new home, scheduled to open in 2008, will be named the Todd Bolender Center for Dance and Creativity.