Grand Survivor.

George Zoritch is a living reminder of the great period when dance flourished after Diaghilev.

GEORGE ZORITCH, one of the few survivors of ballet's grand period after Diaghilev, is a living purveyor of dance technique and history, a colleague and personal acquaintance of many of the great dancers, musicians, artists, teachers, and choreographers of the last seventy years. His partners included almost all of the ballerinas who rose to fame between 1936 and 1962, when he retired from the stage. Although never considered a bravura dancer, Zoritch was nevertheless hailed for his polished, lyrical technique; his long, beautiful line; and his ability to delve deeply into the heart of a character and to embody the essence of emotion in a restrained, elegant fashion.

He was born in Moscow in 1917. When he was fourteen months old, his mother, learning of his father's unfaithfulness, packed up him and his older brother and moved to Kovno, Lithuania. A gifted singer and actress, she soon joined the Kovno Opera. George grew up in the theater, starting ballet training with Pavel Petroff at age eleven. Petroff was so struck by George's natural suppleness and talent that he immediately put the boy on scholarship.

In 1931 Petroff moved to Argentina, and Mrs. Zoritch decided to move to Paris, where her son could further his training. However, she couldn't pay for classes, and it was not until 1932 that George received a scholarship and was enrolled in classes with Fyodor Wassilieff. He soon became fast friends with classmate Andre Eglevsky. Later that year Mrs. Zoritch heard that Olga Preobrajenska, the legendary Russian emigree, was taking a few scholarship students. George was accepted as a student in her famous school and studied with her for about nine months. She insisted that he audition for a place in the newly formed Ida Rubinstein Company, which was scheduled to rehearse for six months and given six performances at the Paris Opera House.

The audition was conducted by Rubinstein; Michel Fokine and his wife, Vera; and Anatole Vilzak and his wife, Ludmilla Schollar. This small company was formed in 1933, giving the adolescent Zoritch his first professional job. Afterward he danced briefly with the Grand Opera Russe Company with Anton Dolin and Vera Nemchinova and the great basso, Fyodor Chaliapin. Bronislava Nijinska was choreographer for this group. Zoritch was offered a contract and joined the Dandre-Levitoff Russian Ballet for a tour of Australia, Africa, and India. The 1934-35 tour was organized by Anna Pavlova's husband, Victor Dandre Along with giving Zoritch a chance to observe and work with such artists as Olga Spessivtseva, the tour convinced him that he possessed the technique and wit to perform difficult parts in a variety of styles, and that he had the physical endurance to live through conditions that were incredibly difficult--the tropical sun was so hot it was impossible to go up on deck during the day, and impossible to sleep anywhere but on deck at night.

Back in Paris, he rejoined Nijinska's troupe, now called Ballet Russe de Pads. In 1936, at the suggestion of Tamara Toumanova, he auditioned for and was accepted into Colonel de Basil's Ballets Russes. In this major company, his career began to blossom with good notices in many leading roles. Choreographers began to seek him out. David Lichine created major roles for him. Leonide Massine, who made the eighteen-year-old Zoritch his protege not only choreographed eleven ballets on him, but he and his wife, Eugenia Delarova, virtually adopted him.

During a 1937 London engagement, Massine told Zoritch to begin looking around for dancers good enough to be recruited for a new company, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which Serge Denham was surreptitiously forming to tour North and South America. (One of those he recommended was Frederic Franklin.) In 1938, Zoritch joined the troupe and stayed for five years, establishing an American reputation. In the U.S. he tried many forms of dance--Broadway musicals, movies, and operettas--and in 1951 he returned to Europe to replace his former classmate and friend Eglevsky as principal dancer of the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.

Zoritch has vivid memories of his time with this fabled troupe, particularly of Nijinska as its ballet mistress: "Her quasi red-gray hair looked like patches of withered grass after flying saucers had landed. She was a chain-smoker and always looked disheveled and feverish, and she used her husband as her spokesperson to relay her wishes to the dancers. At the time, she was trying to make a second Nijinsky of Serge Golovine and was setting the Spectre de la Rose. My partner, Nancy Carlson, and I were to alternate in the ballet; however, she would pay no attention to us, not even allowing us to rehearse on the side of the studio while she rehearsed Golovine."

After Zoritch received eighteen curtain calls and critical raves for the ballet, Nijinska was so furious she couldn't bear to have him in the rehearsal studio if she were present. She sent her husband to tell him to leave, but Zoritch responded, "These premises are rented by the marquis for all the dancers." The husband returned with the ultimatum that one of them must leave. "I told him that if she feels like leaving, it was fine with me," Zoritch says. "The great Nijinska was full of hot air and she departed in a great huff, but only after she had finished her rehearsal."

During this period, Zoritch was particularly hailed for Albrecht in Giselle and, ironically, for two Fokine roles, the Poet in Les Sylphides and the Spirit in Le Spectre de la Rose. "I was not in favor with Fokine," Zoritch recalls. "When I was still a student, he once asked me at a rehearsal to do the very difficult cossack step, [the squat-and-kick] prisiadka-something that a short-muscled dancer like Yurek Lazowski should do, not a long-muscled thirteen-year-old with nine months' training. He exploded at me when I could not do it, calling me a `lady in a corset.' He ruined my knees and made me his scapegoat. How strange that I later received some of my best notices in his ballets."

Zoritch would go on to star in more than fifty ballets by other famous choreographers, such as Petipa, Ivanov, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Ashton, Lifar, and Taras. Among his stellar partners would be Alexandra Danilova, Irina Baronova, Alicia Markova, Rosella Hightower, Maria Tallchief, Marjorie Tallchief, and Natalie Krassovska.

Americans know Zoritch best as a principal dancer with Denham's Ballet Russe, which he rejoined in 1957 and with which he remained until 1962. He made good use of his time during the company's tours by holding master classes at colleges and dance schools and going out of his way to meet ballet teachers across the U.S. Each season when the tour ended he led his own "teaching tour" nationwide and was much in demand because of his background and his experience and the vast repertory of roles that he could set on students and regional ballet companies. When his performing days ended, he was well prepared for his second career as a teacher.

American students did not have an easy time in his classes. Like Preobrajenska, Zoritch was very demanding and insisted that they pay close attention; he made very sarcastic corrections for repeated mistakes. Above all, he was concerned with details of line and a proper attitude toward the material. He opened his own school in Los Angeles, but his heart was not in teaching children, and he began to look for a position in a college or university. It was a long search, for this was before schools began hiring professionals to teach ballet. In 1973, on the recommendation of Sandra Noll Hammond, the University of Arizona engaged him to start a ballet department and by doing so placed itself in the vanguard of those universities with dance departments that could challenge advanced students on a professional level. Zoritch's personality was better suited to college students, and he delighted in correcting the techniques with which they arrived. Both the department and his reputation grew, and when he retired in 1987 the university had a well-established, highly respected department.

Never one to sit and wait for something to happen, Zoritch in retirement began to reacquaint himself with the land of his birth by corresponding with Russians. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he became fast friends with Yuri Grigorovich, then head of the Bolshoi Ballet, and with its current director, Vladimir Vasiliev, and his wife, Ekaterina Maximova; and it wasn't long before he was invited to Russia to be an honored judge for the Diaghilev Arabesque Competition at Perm.

Now, after writing for the Moscow magazine Balet and becoming something of a historian on the development of ballet outside Russia, a third career as a writer is emerging. He is expanding the reminiscences he published in Balet into a full-scale autobiography. He watched, he learned, and now he is writing a story that reads like a novel, filled with characters famous and infamous. As his delighted friends know all too well, Zoritch possesses a barbed wit and a vivid style well up to describing the heady artistic swirl he has been a part of since the 1930s. He can distill colorful experiences into vivid descriptions: Igor Stravinsky "resembled his music, angular and dissonant, as written on old parchment." And the imperious Ida Rubinstein "sat like a precious diamond, surrounded in a gold setting of honorary guests."

His surprisingly caustic wit can also be turned on himself. Once, when watching himself in a televised interview, he suddenly sat up, leaned forward as if to challenge the set, and said, after much scrutiny: "What a terrible accent) That man should be banned from American TV." Zoritch still lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he writes his memoirs surrounded by walls of pictures of famous dancers. A glass case contains such memorabilia as awards from princes, medals, and other honors he has received, including the Vaslav Nijinsky and Serge Diaghilev medals, given him in 1994. He still has a strong interest in the dance world, and he takes barre once or twice a week, in itself a strong recommendation for ballet as a prescription of longevity. He retains his wonderful sense of humor and continues to make his sardonic comments on life, as it is lived in the ballet world of George Zoritch.

Freidann Parker, co founder and lifetime trustee of Colorado Ballet, is forging a new career as a dance writer.