George Zoritch, Star of Ballets Russe

Published on Sunday 15 November 2009 21:27

Born: 6 June, 1917, in Moscow. Died: 1 November, 2009 in Tucson, Arizona, aged 92

GEORGE Zoritch was an international star in the rival Ballet Russe companies who stood out for his matinee-idol looks and bold stage presence and who later became one of American ballet's respected teachers.

The acclaimed 2005 documentary Ballets Russes recently offered filmgoers a taste of Zoritch's vivid personality. At one point in the film, he and the ballerina Nathalie Krassovska, both in their 80s, relived their past partnership in a segment from Giselle, punctuating their mime with spicy comments.

In his memoir, Ballet Mystique (2000), Zoritch readily recognised that he was not a bravura technician. He felt that artistry was more important than technique for dancers like him, who joined the Russian migr troupes that succeeded Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in the 1930s. Often they used variations on that company's name.

"What made the Ballet Russe so successful was that it was composed of half-starved ballet- craving dancers who gave everything from their inner souls," Zoritch told the Los Angeles Times in 2007.

Zoritch opened a ballet school in West Hollywood in 1964, two years after the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, in which he was the mainstay, was dissolved. He taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1973 to 1987 and more recently served on the jury at the Perm ballet competitions in Russia.

Born in Moscow on 6 June, 1917, he moved after the Russian revolution with his mother and brother to Kovno, Lithuania, where he first studied ballet. Zoritch then settled in Paris at 14 and studied with the Maryinsky ballerina Olga Preobrajenska, who also trained the "baby ballerinas" promoted by George Balanchine.

Zoritch's career took a peripatetic path through the companies led by other Russian migrs. After dancing with Ida Rubinstein's troupe in 1933, he performed with the Russian Classical Ballet, organised by Anna Pavlova's widower, Victor Dandr, then joined Bronislava Nijinska's Ballets Russes de Paris in 1935.

His declared mentor was the choreographer Lonide Massine. Zoritch starred in Massine's works with both Col W de Basil's Ballets Russes, which he joined in 1936, and the rival Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which he joined in 1938. He remained with that troupe until 1962, one of its last veterans.

Zoritch had also been a principal in the 1940s and 1950s with the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas. Along the way, he appeared in Broadway musicals and a few Hollywood films, such as Samson and Delilah (1949).

With his good looks, elegant line and charismatic projection in title roles in Afternoon of a Faun and Le Spectre de la Rose, he never went unnoticed.

In a typical comment in the 1950s, the French critic Irne Lidova compared Zoritch to the "Greek youths sculpted by Praxiteles".