His son, Mark, said the cause was heart failure.
Often described as a dancer’s dancer by critics and fellow dancers because of the excellence of his classical technique, Rhodes was also an outstanding and internationally known teacher who headed the dance divisions at the Juilliard School and New York University.
“He was my hero when I was a 17-year-old ballet student,” Kevin McKenzie, now artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said.
In 1972, his teacher Mary Day, director of the Washington Ballet, invited Rhodes to coach McKenzie for the international ballet competition in Varna, Bulgaria. As McKenzie recalled, Rhodes proved “astounding, demonstrating the movement himself, with his technique responding to the music.” At Varna, McKenzie won the silver medal.
McKenzie returned the favor over the years, inviting Rhodes to teach company class to Ballet Theater’s dancers. Rhodes was teaching these classes last month. “They were packed,” McKenzie said. “There was the technique he taught and always his joy. It was a special class, teaching at this level.”
Unlike today’s dancers, who are usually identified with a single company, Rhodes was a member at various times of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Joffrey Ballet, the Harkness Ballet, the Dutch National Ballet and the Pennsylvania Ballet. He was a regular guest with the Eliot Feld Ballet and Dennis Wayne’s Dancers and also a guest artist abroad. He ended his performing career in 1978 after touring in Europe with Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.
Along the way, he was artistic director of the Harkness Ballet, co-director of the Milwaukee Ballet and finally artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, where his choice of new choreographers and bravura dancers from 1989 to 1999 brought new attention to the company and had a huge impact on ballet in Canada.
Lawrence Rhodes was born Nov. 24, 1939, in Mount Hope, West Virginia, and moved with his family to Detroit when he was 2. When he was 9, a classmate introduced him to tap dance lessons. But after seeing Ballet Theater on tour, he decided to study ballet with a well-known Detroit teacher, Violette Armand. Dorothy Hild, another teacher, took him on a tour of state fairs in 1956.
As Rhodes often recalled, his father was willing to finance his college education in Michigan but told him that he would be on his own if he was determined to study ballet in New York.
According to Chava Lansky, a writer who began collaborating with Rhodes on his autobiography, Rhodes then worked in the Chicago Theatrical Shoe Company and arrived in New York on July 4, 1957. As a declaration of independence, he enrolled immediately in the school affiliated with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. A year later, he began studying with Robert Joffrey, who had recently formed his own company. Rhodes would credit Armand, Joffrey and the New York teacher Maggie Black as his main influences.
Rhodes danced in the corps of the Ballet Russe from 1958- 1960, when he joined the Joffrey Ballet. After Rebekah Harkness, that company’s chief financial backer, tried to assert artistic control, Joffrey broke with her in 1964 to form a new Joffrey Ballet.
Most of the dancers from the old Joffrey, including Rhodes and his future wife, Danish ballerina Lone Isaksen, remained under contract to Harkness and became part of her new troupe, the Harkness Ballet.
That Rhodes performed with so many companies was symptomatic of the financial turmoil that the American dance world faced in the 1960s. Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo closed in 1962. Joffrey’s new company needed to stabilize. Ballet Theater was saved from closing by a grant from the newly established National Endowment for the Arts. In 1961, George Balanchine told the young Kay Mazzo that he couldn’t afford to hire her for the New York City Ballet in the summer and to come back in the fall.
Citing her own financial problems, Harkness fired Rhodes and his new co-director, Benjamin Harkarvy, and closed the Harkness Ballet in 1970.
That was the year Rhodes and Isaksen were married. A major dancer in her own right, she and Rhodes formed a striking partnership in ballets that were created for them. In “After Eden,” choreographer John Butler cast them in the Harkness as Adam and Eve facing existentialist angst in the world to which they were expelled.
Despairing and sensuous in every entwined embrace, the duet was a study in human need, performed with intense resonance.
Isaksen died in 2010 at 68. In addition to their son, Mark A. Rhodes, Rhodes is survived by a granddaughter and his brother, Mark R. Rhodes.
It was in the Harkness, thanks to the international tours and New York seasons supported by Harkness, that Rhodes had the opportunity to become a brilliant star in all but name.
In an appraisal of Rhodes’ dancing, Clive Barnes, dance critic of The New York Times, wrote in 1975 that Russian émigré dancers like Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov “are stars in a way that, at present, American male dancers are not.” Yet, he emphasized, Rhodes was a great dancer who also deserved celebration, adding, “To see him is never to forget him.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.