Antony Tudor born 4 April 1908 (d. 1987)Antony Tudor was a highly influential English ballet choreographer, dancer and teacher.
Born William Cook, the Cockney-born Tudor, who discovered dance accidentally, began dancing professionally with Marie Rambert in 1928, becoming general assistant for her Ballet Club the next year. A precocious choreographer, at age twenty-three he created for her dancers Cross Garter'd, then Lysistrata, The Planets and other works at the little Mercury Theatre, and his two most famous and revolutionary, Jardin Aux Lilas (Lilac Garden) and Dark Elegies, before the age of thirty, himself dancing main roles.
In 1938, he founded the London Ballet with Rambert members, including his future lifelong partner, Hugh Laing, Andreé Howard and Agnes de Mille, but, with the onset of World War II, in 1940 was invited with them to New York, joining Richard Pleasant's and Lucia Chase's reorganised Ballet Theater. Chase's company was later to become the American Ballet Theatre, with which Tudor was closely associated for the rest of his life. He was resident choreographer with Ballet Theater for ten years, restaging some of his earlier works but also setting the new works, his great Pillar of Fire, Romeo and Juliet, Dim Lustre and Undertow, on that company by the end of the war.
Retiring from dancing in 1950, he headed the faculty of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, taught at the Juilliard School recurrently from 1950 onwards, and was artistic director for the Royal Swedish Ballet from 1963 to 1964. He choreographed three works for the New York City Ballet. Tudor continued his teaching career as Professor of Ballet Technique at the Department of Dance, University of California from 1973 (work curtailed by a serious heart condition), while rejoining American Ballet Theater in 1974 as associate artistic director, creating The Leaves Are Fading and Tiller In the Fields, his last major work, in 1978. With Laing he continued seasonal residence in Laguna Beach, California.
Antony Tudor is generally accepted to be one of the great originals of modern dance forms. Along with George Balanchine, he is seen as a principal transformer of ballet into a modern art, but of a genius that uses, rather than proceeds from, ballet forms. His work is usually considered as modern 'psychological' expression, but characterised by austerity, elegance and nobility. Mikhail Baryshnikov stated: 'We do Tudor's ballets because we must. Tudor's work is our conscience.'
A disciplined Zen Buddhist, Antony Tudor died on Easter Sunday in his residence at the First Zen Institute of America.