Former ballerina Violette Verdy takes a multifaceted approach to teaching

By Steve Sucato

“Everybody needs to be in a room with Violette Verdy,” says Patricia McBride, Verdy’s fellow former New York City Ballet star and longtime friend. “She is like sunshine.”

Verdy’s effervescence and unwavering positivity have come to characterize not only her personality but her approach to her life and career. While her successes as a performer, author, and administrator have been many, it is perhaps her career as a dance educator and coach that has proved the most far reaching and enduring.

“In a way, I learned to teach when I was learning to dance,” says Verdy, now a distinguished professor of ballet at Indiana University in Bloomington. “When your teachers are really great, they are teaching you to be a teacher.”

Verdy, here teaching at the School of American Ballet in October 2008, describes her approach as a mixture of everything she has learned, with an emphasis on Balanchine’s teachings. (Photo by Rosalie O’Connor)

Verdy was born Nelly Armande Guillerm in Pont-l’Abbé, France, on December 1, 1933, to a shopkeeper father (who died when she was a year old) and a schoolteacher mother. She survived childhood illness and the German occupation of France during World War II to become an icon in the dance world and one of France’s greatest exports (see “Verdy’s Fast Stats”).

A former dancer with Roland Petit’s Les Ballets de Paris, London Festival Ballet, La Scala, and American Ballet Theatre, Verdy is best known for her two decades (1958–77) as a principal dancer with New York City Ballet (NYCB). A former director of Paris Opera Ballet and Boston Ballet, she also choreographs and has written several books, including two for children.

Of Verdy’s numerous teachers, she credits Carlotta Zambelli, a Milanese ballerina who danced with La Scala and the Paris Opera, and Madame Rousanne Sarkissian, a pre-revolution Russian dancer and teacher, as her greatest early influences. “They broke down ballet exercises into their component parts and reconstructed them gradually to get to more difficult tests and results,” says Verdy. “You were made to understand what you were doing and why you were doing it, giving you full command of each element that made up a step or phrase.”

It is Madame Rousanne’s positive demeanor as an instructor that Verdy most emulates in her teaching approach. Add to that the incomparable influence of Balanchine, and the seeds were sown to make Verdy one of the most sought after and respected ballet teachers working today.

Verdy says she takes a non-imposing approach to teaching, preferring to bring out the qualities of her students through suggestion rather than force her will on them. “I give them the pleasure of discovering what they have if they do not know it, and if they do, how to use it and how important it is,” she says. “As teachers, we are only like midwives—we deliver.”

Verdy sees ballet as a calling and those students who come to it as deserving of kindness and nurturing. “Ballet, or anything else a student might be doing, is only an attempt at self-realization and happiness,” she says. “[Students] want to be loved, recognized, admired, and respected. If they choose ballet to get that done, they want to be treated well, because ballet is a very hard road to take.”

“There is lots of love and good spirit in her classes,” says Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, another New York City Ballet alum and the director of the Chautauqua [NY] Institution summer dance program, where Verdy taught for 19 years. “She is an amazing communicator and is as comfortable teaching at Chautauqua as she is at the Bolshoi or Royal Ballet schools. Her classes are so well constructed and have so much purpose.”

A good ballet school is a cross between West Point and a seminary, Verdy recalls the late New York City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein saying. “He is exactly right,” she says.

While Verdy does not impose a dress code in her classes—she prefers to take her students as they are and as an expression of who they are, as long as they can be seen properly—she believes that “ballet is law and order.” Consequently she also believes in a strong work ethic and obeying proper rules in executing ballet exercises.

“In-class tension is very negative, but intensity is very desirable,” says Verdy. “Intensity is concentration, talent, and the control to do work that obtains a legal result, [which comes from obeying the rules]. When dancers have it too easy, their training tends to not carry weight, depth, or consistency. When they are challenged, something deeper comes.”

Like many of her own teachers, Verdy teaches the core elements of ballet, breaking them down and relating to her students the reasons for them.

“She will give us very simple ballet exercises that work on technique,” says 20-year-old Juliann Hyde, a third-year ballet major at Indiana University. “They are so simple that they are almost hard for us, because they require so much concentration.” Verdy also believes in training dancers to be great artists as well. Says Hyde, “She brings out our artistic side. Sometimes people are more interested in who can do the most turns or lift their leg the highest. She helps us see that there is much more to ballet than that.”

“In a way, I learned to teach when I was learning to dance. When your teachers are really great, they are teaching you to be a teacher.” —Violette Verdy

Verdy describes the style she teaches as a mixture of everything she has learned, with perhaps an emphasis on Balanchine’s teachings. But music is at the foundation of her signature teaching style. “I danced because of the music,” she says. “It is my number-one subject and what I rely on in my classes to teach timing.” She likes to use a wide variety of music in her classes, which she says is enjoyable for her, her students, and her accompanist. “If I have a good pianist in class, we go to town,” she says.

Verdy’s approach to teaching is like that of a chef, says Bonnefoux. “She comes to class as if to prepare a great meal with a little bit of this and a little of that.” According to McBride, Bonnefoux’s wife and a Chautauqua faculty member, Verdy calls it “cooking up a class.”

Food analogies and metaphors are commonplace in Verdy’s classes, says former student Carrie Burns Frase. “She would tell us to ‘whip our eggs,’ referring to the way she wanted us to do a double rond de jambe en l’air, and that the physicality of a plié should be chewy, like fondue.”

And when Verdy isn’t describing ballet exercises along gastronomical lines, she conjures up equally descriptive images for her students, such as describing the angle of the head as “resting it on a pillow and showing your little cheeks.” By saying, “Ride high on your horse,” she emphasizes that the effort happens from the waist down and that the upper body should appear calm.

“She uses language fully in painting mental pictures for her students,” says Michael Vernon, chair of the Department of Ballet at Indiana University.

Verdy takes a hands-on approach to “cooking” in her classes, guiding students with touch as well as with her voice. “There is compassion in the way she holds a hand or places one on the shoulder of a student,” says Bonnefoux. “That physical contact with the students makes the information pass.”

NYCB ballet master in chief Peter Martins once told Verdy that she was like a good detective in that she could see dancer talent sooner than most. “I am a really good scout for talent,” says Verdy. “I can see it in two seconds, as well as the character of a dancer. This is one of the things that helps me to go to the things they need sooner.”

For Verdy, talent is literally “the entire atmosphere the person has.” The game, she says, is that often the best talents don’t come in bodies with the most facility; that is when dance instructors have their work cut out for them. “If dancers did not have challenges, they would not be great,” she says.

The 75-year-old Verdy’s detective instincts have led her to believe that ballet as an art form may be in danger. She sees a shift in tastes, increasing demands on people’s time, and changing attitudes as threats to ballet’s future. “I need to teach as long as I can because people are getting lazier all the time; they do not want to work that hard, and probably ballet is not going to survive,” says Verdy. She does feel, however, that as long as audiences want to see ballet, there will be people to carry on its beauty and tradition.

As much sought after as a coach as she is as a teacher, Verdy brings to the rehearsal studio the same effervescence and passion she brings to the classroom. Whether it is helping students or professionals tackle a Balanchine masterwork or one of her own works, Verdy believes that good coaching lets dancers become unique in what they are doing. “You don’t put on them what you do [as a dancer]. You encourage them to discover who they are and to be who they are,” says Verdy. “People think coaching is telling them what to do and forcing them to do something that is unnatural to them. It is the complete opposite.”

Whether teaching or coaching, Verdy exudes wisdom that is recognized by many who work with her. It is the wisdom that comes with decades of learning from and working with great teachers, choreographers, and dancers. It is also the wisdom to put the needs of those who look to you for guidance first and to treat them with dignity, caring, and respect.

“I think Violette is an icon,” says Vernon. “She is the spirit of ballet.”

Verdy’s Fast Stats

• Roles created include George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux (1960), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962), and Jewels (1967); Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering (1969) and In the Night (1970)
• Director of Paris Opera Ballet 1977–1980
• Co-director of Boston Ballet 1980–82; director 1983–84
• Honors include the French Order of Arts and Letters, a 1967 Dance Magazine Award, and most recently, France’s highest decoration, Chevalier (Knight) of the National Order of the Legion of Honor
• Books: Of Swans, Sugarplums and Satin Slippers: Ballet Stories for Children; Giselle of the Wilis; Giselle: A Role for a Lifetime (co-author); Getting Started in Ballet: A Parent’s Guide to Dance Education (with Anna Paskevska)
• Films: The French feature Ballerina (1949); and two documentaries, Violette et Mr. B (2008) and Violette: A Life in Dance (1982)

A new DVD, Violette Verdy: The Artist Teacher, due to be released July 29, will give everyone the opportunity to “be in a room” with Verdy and experience her personality and teaching style. The 40-minute video, recorded at the Chautauqua Institution and directed by Nefin Dinç and produced by Sara Lundine, features a look at Verdy’s career, footage of her in the studio, and interviews. It will be available through the Chautauqua Institution’s bookstore and online from vaimusic.com.