Sallie Wilson, whose performances with American Ballet Theater during the 1960s and ’70s established her as one of America’s finest dramatic ballerinas, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.The cause was cancer, said Diana Byer, artistic director of New York Theater Ballet, the company Ms. Wilson worked with most recently.
Ms. Wilson’s strong stage presence made her every role vivid, whether in classics or in modern ballets by Antony Tudor, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins or Alvin Ailey. In 1979, Jennifer Dunning, writing in The New York Times, said that Ms. Wilson had “etched herself indelibly on the consciousness of the New York balletgoing public.”
She was especially praised in the works of Antony Tudor, the great British choreographer of dramatic ballets who came to New York in 1940 and was long associated with Ballet Theater, now American Ballet Theater.
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Ms. Wilson always believed in total involvement in roles, even if the part was as an extra in a Wagner opera. “At the Met, I once had to stand still for 45 minutes as Tannhäuser’s page,” she once said.
“As far as I’m concerned, if you’re on stage in a ballet, you’re doing dancing,” she said on another occasion. “Any movement or non-movement on stage is dance.”
Light Cue 23
Notes from the Drafting Table
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The text of Light Cue 23 by Lucas Krech is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at lucaskrech.com.
