Marina Svetlova, Dancer and Teacher, Dies at 86

Marina Svetlova, who played an important role in American dance education after a wide-ranging performing career in international ballet from the 1930s to the 1960s, died on Feb. 11 at her home in Bloomington, Ind. She was 86.

She died after being in failing health since a stroke several years ago, said Lawrence Davis, a longtime friend.

Ms. Svetlova made her professional debut as a child in 1931 in Paris with the legendary experimental troupe of Ida Rubinstein. A soloist with the Original Ballet Russe and a ballerina with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, she later earned a reputation as a major teacher.

She was professor of ballet and chairwoman of the ballet department at Indiana University in Bloomington from 1969 to 1992. Hundreds of young students trained with her at the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester from 1959 to 1964. And she directed her own summer school, the Svetlova Dance Center in Dorset, Vt., from 1965 to 1995. She also choreographed for regional opera companies from the 1960s to the early 1980s.

Ms. Svetlova was born Yvette von Hartmann in Paris on May 3, 1922, to Russian parents and studied there with Vera Trefilova, Lubov Egorova and other Russian émigré ballerinas as well as with Anatole Vilzak in New York from 1940 to 1957.

After appearing with Rubinstein’s troupe in “Amphion,” a ballet inspired by Paul Valéry’s poem about the god Mercury, and choreographed in Constructivist style by Léonide Massine, the young dancer attracted notice by winning ballet prizes in Paris.

From 1939 through 1941, she was a soloist with the Original Ballet Russe, one of the successor companies to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and danced on its 10-month tour of Australia during the first months of World War II. It was on that tour that David Lichine choreographed “Graduation Ball,” a comic work about a cadet ball that became a classic of American ballet companies. In an early version, Ms. Svetlova appeared in a now-discarded trio, titled the “Mathematics and Natural History Lesson.” She portrayed a pupil facing two women dressed as balding professors who held a compass and a butterfly net.

Ms. Svetlova’s classical training was put to more conventional use when she danced leading roles in “Aurora’s Wedding” from “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Les Sylphides.” When the company was in New York in 1941, George Balanchine choreographed “Balustrade,” to a Stravinsky score, with Ms. Svetlova in its second section. In 1968, she worked with Stravinsky, staging his “Histoire du Soldat” in Seattle.

Ms. Svetlova was guest artist with Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater) in 1943, shortly before she joined the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where she was its ballerina from 1943 to 1950, often partnered by Leon Varkas. She danced with the New York City Opera in 1951-52 and toured nationally and internationally with her own concert group from 1944 to 1969.

No immediate family members survive.