Barbara Weisberger, who founded the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia with a steadfast vision that would turn the troupe into a nationally recognized company, died on December 23rd at her home in Kingston, Pennsylvania. She was 94 years old.
Her family reported her death.
Originally trained in ballet in New York and Philadelphia, the young Barbara enjoyed studying dance like many children, but never had a career as a dancer in a professional company. Instead, she became an influential ballet teacher who played an important role in the development of regional ballet in America.
She was also the first child George Balanchine admitted to the school he opened in Manhattan in 1934. That connection was renewed after her family moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where she opened a ballet school in 1953 and attended seminars that Balanchine organized for teachers affiliated with small community troops.
Ms. Weisberger founded another school in Philadelphia in 1962 and the Pennsylvania Ballet the following year. By 1974, as Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times that year, the company was “absolutely one of the best troops in the country”.
Ms. Weisberger’s time as artistic director, which ended in 1982, was a tour de force. She combined a focus on works by Balanchine, the official advisor to the Pennsylvania Ballet, with an openness to works by a variety of other choreographers.
A major early hit was the version of Carl Orff’s rough cantata “Carmina Burana,” performed by the Pennsylvania dancers with the New York City Opera.
During the same period Antony Tudor, the king of psychological ballet, staged his passionate dance drama “Jardin aux Lilas” for the Pennsylvania Company. In a 1967 performance, Barnes praised the “sensitivity” of Tudor’s production, adding that “the dancers repay the compliment with an almost touching sense of devotion.”
Ms. Weisberger started her company in Philadelphia with only a few students from Wilkes Barre School. These included Rose Marie Wright, who later became the lead dancer with Twyla Tharp’s modern dance troupe Roseanne Caruso and Robert Rodham, who after her dance in the New York Ballet also acted as the choreographer and then as the company’s ballet master.
Barbara Sandonato and Patricia Turko were highly recommended by Balanchine’s school, and Ms. Weisberger later recruited a world-class dancer, Lawrence Rhodes, while developing newcomers.
The troupe performed frequently in New York during the 1960s and 1970s, usually at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at City Center in Manhattan. Public television made it known nationwide with its series “Dance in America”.
It also performed with missionary zeal in the United States, touring for one-night stands with one bus for the dancers and one for the orchestra. As Ms. Sandonato recalled in a telephone interview, some viewers had never seen live ballet performances.
Once, she said, there was no applause after the performance of “Concerto Barocco”, a Balanchine signature piece, and none for the second and third works in the program. But, she said after the troupe closed with Balanchine’s “Scotch Symphony”, “the audience screamed and roared.”
“The audience later told us at reception that they wanted to be very respectful until the end,” said Ms. Sandonato.
For Gretchen Warren, who joined the company in 1965, the first few years were fraught with small dangers. During an outdoor performance, she said, the dancers danced over small frogs on a makeshift stage in a cow pasture.
But there were also great joys. She was delighted, she said, that Ms. Weisberger had retained the choreography that Balanchine later modified in his own company, the New York Ballet, to the regret of some fans. One example was the Arabic dance from his “Nutcracker”. “I did a sluggish solo and danced at half the pace as it was originally done,” said Ms. Warren.
However, Ms. Weisberger didn’t want the Pennsylvania Ballet to be a copy of the New York Ballet, Ms. Sandonato said. “Balanchine talked about where to put an accent and how to do a plié,” she said. “But we had individual qualities, and he allowed that.”
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Barbara Linshes was born in Brooklyn on October 28, 1926, the daughter of Herman and Sally (Goldstein) Linshes, who worked in the clothing business. The family moved to Wilkes-Barre in 1940 and Mr. Linshes ran a well-known business there, the Paris Dress Shop.
When Barbara was 5 years old and still living in Brooklyn, her mother enrolled her in a local ballet school run by Marian Harwick, who had danced with the Metropolitan Opera. Thanks to Mrs. Harwick, Balanchine, newly arrived from Europe and little known in America, accepted 8-year-old Barbara as the first child in his School of American Ballet. Three years later she moved to the Metropolitan Opera ballet school.
Coincidentally, this was the time when Balanchine was tasked with choreographing new ballets and opera productions for the Metropolitan Opera. Barbara noticed him again. “I’ve been to the Met in all of his ballets – anything kids could use,” she told an interviewer.
On the way, she studied at the pioneering Littlefield Ballet School in Philadelphia as a teenager, attended the University of Delaware, and graduated from Penn State. While running her school and student company in Wilkes-Barre, she became a leading figure in the National Regional Ballet Association.
Ms. Weisberger founded the Pennsylvania Ballet in Philadelphia because she thought the city could better support a professional company. Nevertheless, she remained connected to the Wilkes-Barre region and spent every weekend there with her children.
She married Ernest Weisberger in 1949. He and his younger brother started a company that made bespoke kitchens. He died in 2013 at the age of 94.
Mrs. Weisberger is survived by a daughter, Wendy Kranson; one son, Steven; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
In 1972, Ms. Weisberger invited the American choreographer Benjamin Harkarvy, who worked in Holland, to become her deputy director and then artistic director alongside her as executive artistic director. But after years of struggling financially, they faced a hostile board of directors. Ms. Weisberger and Mr. Harkarvy submitted their forced resignation in 1982.
Rather than starting another business, in 1984 she started the Carlisle Project, an innovative program in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to develop choreographers. she ran it until 1996.
When asked over the years about her enduring loyalty to Balanchine at the Pennsylvania Ballet, she replied that it was “an aspired, unimposed influence”.
“He’s the best,” she would say.
