ANTONY TUDOR (1908 - 1987)

Choreographer Lilac Garden
It certainly needed Marie Rambert's inspired gift for talent-spotting, to recognise the potential genius of 19-year old William Cook (born 1908 in London), an invoice clerk at Smithfield meat market, dance-mad, stage-struck and determined, who came to Rambert at the suggestion of Cyril Beaumont, for ballet lessons after his day job ended, and stayed to become her stage manager, assistant teacher, pianist and general factotum. Despite this late start, Antony Tudor, as he called himself professionally, rose rapidly through the 1930s to become the only serious British choreographic rival to Frederick Ashton, another Rambert discovery but moving away from her Ballet Club to a future with Ninette de Valois' emerging Royal Ballet.

Tudor's 1931 choreographic debut Cross-Garter'd (based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) earned praise from Massine, and was followed by more ballets, including Lysistrata, Adam and Eve (1932) and The Planets (1934) before the mature successes of Lilac Garden (1936) and Dark Elegies (1937) and the original, entertaining Judgement of Paris and Gala Performance (1938).

In 1938, possibly chafing under Rambert's shadow, Tudor formed London Ballet with Andrée Howard, Agnes de Mille and his lifelong partner Hugh Laing; and in 1940, as the war engulfed Britain, Tudor left London Ballet in the hands of Peggy van Praagh, and accepted Lucia Chase's invitation to join the emerging American Ballet Theater in New York, where he was to remain as resident choreographer for ten years, restaging some of his earlier works and creating new ballets including the seminal Pillar of Fire (1942). Laing and de Mille went with him and made their own parallel impacts on the history of American ballet and the Broadway musical.

Tudor retired from dancing in 1950 to direct the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, teach at Juilliard School and University of California, while continuing to choreograph works for New York City Ballet (1951-2) and National Ballet of Canada. He was Artistic Director of Royal Swedish Ballet (1963-64) and continued to travel worldwide, creating ballets, teaching and inspiring widely, rejoining American Ballet Theater as Associate Artistic Director in 1974. Among his later major works is the frequently revived The Leaves Are Fading (1975) to elegiac Dvorak music.

A committed Zen Buddhist, Antony Tudor succumbed to a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1987 and died, greatly respected, at the age of 79 in New York. As one of the twentieth century's most important choreographers, his work has been characterised as psychologically, emotionally and dramatically profound, full of a deeply-felt understanding of the human heart and condition.

©Tim Tubbs