Upon application, she received a full scholarship to Brandeis University, near Boston, and spent the next four years there as a theater arts major, with an emphasis on dance.
[3] Soon after she graduated from Brandeis in June 1958, Chazin auditioned for Agnes de Mille and was hired for the dancing ensemble of Goldilocks, a Broadway show starring Don Ameche, Elaine Stritch, and Russell Nype.
For the next several years, Chazin danced in many operas on the Metropolitan stage and continued her classes with Antony Tudor, Alfredo Corvino, and Margaret Craske in the Met's ballet school.
She was often partnered by such leading dancers as Thomas Andrew, Donald Mahler, Howard Sayette, Ron Sequoio, and Vincent Warren, but she sometimes danced solo, as in Cilea's Adrianna Lecouvreur, choreographed by Alexandra Danilova.
The following summer, in 1962, she returned once more to Jacob's Pillow with Thomas Andrew and Company and danced in his Invitations and Images in Five, with guest artists Nathalie Krassovska and Igor Youskevitch.
[6] Upon rejoining New York City Ballet that fall, however, she found that her foot problems had worsened, and she was unable to go on the company's historic tour of Russia in October 1962.
During her Swiss sojourn, in 1963, she took classes for a short time with Valodia Skouratoff, a former Ballets Russes dancer, before returning to America with her new husband and a new surname, hyphenated as Chazin-Bennahum.
Her Ph.D. dissertation,"Livrets of Ballet and Pantomime in Paris during the French Revolution," eventually formed the core of her first book, Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine (1988).
[8] During the 1980s, Chazin-Bennahum worked as choreographer and movement coach in local community theaters, including the Opera Studio of the University of New Mexico and the SouthWest Ballet Company, directed by Edward Ambrose.
In 1998, she went to Italy to begin the first of three full summer seasons (1998-2000) as choreographer in residence at the Opera Academy of Rome, where performances were given in the Basilica of San Clemente.
In 2006, she organized and produced a symposium in Albuquerque on "Crosscurrents in the Indigenous Arts," featuring the Dineh Tah Navajo Dancers, Ballet Folklórico de México, the Bernalillo Matachines Dance Company, and presentations by Carlo Bonfiglioli, Sylvia Rodriguez, and other scholars.
In the course of her academic career, Chazin-Bennahum has presented papers at many meetings of scholarly organizations and has delivered lectures at numerous institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Beyond the borders of the United States, she has lectured at universities in Canada, England, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, and Norway.
Her research in London, Stockholm, Paris, Copenhagen, Oslo, and New York led to publication of her second book, The Ballets of Antony Tudor: Studies in Psyche and Satire (1994).
He was a winner of the Croix de Guerre in World War I, becoming a national hero, and a prominent littérateur on the French cultural scene as well as an influential theatrical impresario.
After the birth of two daughters, Ninotchka and Rachel, Chazin-Bennahum and her family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where her husband finished his medical training and where their third child, Aaron, was born.
Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum has followed in her mother's scholarly footsteps and has become a well-known dance historian of flamenco and gypsy culture in western Europe.