Nebraska's Valerie Roche retires. (News).

Dance notables gathered in Omaha over Memorial Day weekend for a farewell tribute to Valerie Roche, a key figure in the development of Nebraska dance, who retired this spring after a forty-year teaching career.

A native of Birmingham, England, Roche began performing at age 12 in traditional English pantomime theater. She studied ballet with Helena Lehmiski of Birmingham and danced with the Alexandra Theatre Chamber Ballet Company, until a tendon injury at age 19 redirected her interest to teaching.

Roche had planned only a short stay in Nebraska when she arrived in 1962. She was working at an Omaha drugstore when she saw a newspaper article about the newly founded Omaha Academy of Ballet, the state's first nonprofit, professionally oriented school of dance. She began teaching there, and soon afterward became director--a post she held until her retirement.

In 1965 she founded the Omaha Civic Ballet, which developed into the state's first professional ballet company, and also helped launch a dance program at Omaha's Creighton University. She directed the ballet company until 1974, when she left to join the Creighton faculty full-time. She earned an advanced teachers' diploma from the Royal Academy of Dancing and an associate diploma from the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, choreographed extensively for regional opera and theater productions, and helped found the Nebraska Dance Camp, a weeklong intensive program held every summer in Halsey, now entering its fifteenth year.

Roche spent her last few weeks on the job choreographing her own farewell party--a gala performance of The Sleeping Beauty. It featured current and past students plus a roster of professional, Roche-trained guest artists, including Brian Bender (Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Colorado Ballet), Kelly Holcombe (Pilobolus and MOMIX), Sara Mau (American Ballet Theatre), and Sandra Organ (a soloist for twelve years at the Houston Ballet and now director of the Sandra Organ Dance Company of Houston).

Organ said the dancers' diverse career mix illustrates the well-rounded technique that Roche taught. "People have used the dance training she gave them in absolutely all the ways that you can dance professionally, from ballet to modern to Broadway," she said.

As Houston Ballet's first black ballerina, Organ later came to appreciate another way Roche's classroom was unusual by 1960s standards. "In her studio, dance was colorblind," she said. "And that wasn't the case everywhere. I didn't even realize that there weren't many other black ballet dancers until I got out of Omaha."

Roche's successor at Creighton, chosen after a national search, will be Lisa Carter, a South Africa native trained at the University of Cape Town and currently teaching in Richmond, Surrey, England. Omaha Academy of Ballet faculty members Patti Zukaitis and Catherine Demes Maydew will take over as co-directors of the academy program.

For Roche, retirement will include spending time in her husband's native New Zealand, as well as plans to "teach and choreograph a little, if anyone wants me." She politely declined to reflect on her forty-year career, saying only that it had gone by so fast that she had never stopped to think about it.

But asked for the secret of her long-term success, she had a ready answer: "I learned from my students."