Basil Thompson (1937-2004).

"When Basil died, I started getting cards and e-mail from all over the world, from people I didn't even know," exclaims Basil Thompson's wife, Kitty, from the family's home in Iowa City, where Basil was tenured professor at the University of Iowa. After a long, distinguished career in ballet, Basil, 67, suffered cardiac arrest and died in November. He had just restaged Petrouchka for the Joffrey Ballet weeks before (see "Reviews," page 141).

Rising from working class roots in northern England to receive a scholarship, Billy Elliot-like, to the Sadler's Wells Ballet, Basil maintained an earthy and tough-love stance toward student and professional alike. "My dead grandmother could do it better than that!" he might observe. After joining The Royal Ballet (then Sadler's Wells) in 1955, he came to the United States in 1960 and joined American Ballet Theatre, attaining soloist and rehearsal assistant positions, then joined the Joffrey Ballet as ballet master in 1967.

Basil understood ballet from the feet up. He was nay teacher in the late 1970s at the Joffrey Ballet's creative peak. When he stood at the barre in his black character shoes and white socks, highly-arched insteps in a perfect fifth, jaunty hips below a chest as proud as any robin sitting on a lawn, bespectacled nose under unruly black curls, you knew why fifth position existed on earth. He would rise sharply into a fifth sous-sus to explode into a buoyant jump, peppered with the gigue, czardas, or mazurka of his beloved character dance.

Basil invited me to make works at the Milwaukee Ballet, where he became ballet master in 1981 and artistic director in 1995. Always interested in new ideas, he kept his encyclopedic knowledge of dance fresh. He was working on Petrouchka for the Joffrey Ballet when he suddenly left us--left us holding the treasures he bestowed on us and our memories of a man uproarious and wise.