William Dollar

He had studied with Catherine Littlefield in Philadelphia[2] and with Mikhail Mordkin, Alexandre Volinine, and Michel Fokine in New York before he took his first class with George Balanchine at the newly established School of American Ballet in 1934.

The latter is a surrealist fantasy in which a glamorous Zorina rises, sparkling, out of a pool of water to dance around classical Greek columns and a statue of a giant white horse with a large ensemble of women clad in flowing tutus and men in formal evening wear.

[7] The purity of Dollar's classical technique, with clean line, remarkable ballon, and exceptional flexibility made him well suited to roles in earlier works created by Michel Fokine, especially the Poet in Les Sylphides and Harlequin in Le Carnaval, which he performed with Ballet Theatre in its first season in 1940.

In 1937, Dollar created the roles of the Joker in The Card Party and the Bridegroom in Le Baiser de la Fée, both set to music by Igor Stravinsky.

In 1946 he created the role of the Black Cat in The Spellbound Child, a lyric fantasy set to Maurice Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges.

In the first movement of The Four Temperaments, set to a commissioned score by Paul Hindemith, Balanchine used Dollar's pliant, arching back to remarkable effect in the Melancholic variation, dramatically extending the expressive range of the classical ballet vocabulary.

Presented by the American Ballet Ensemble at the Metropolitan Opera House, it featured singers in the orchestra pit and dancers on the stage in corresponding roles.

Lew Christensen danced the role of Orpheus; Daphne Vane was Eurydice; and Dollar appeared as Amor, the beautiful winged god of love.

Dollar restaged this work in 1944 as Constantia for Ballet International, a short-lived company created in New York by the Marquis de Cuevas.

Based on an episode in Torquato Tasso's epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581) and set to a score by Raffaelo de Banfield, the ballet tells a tale of tragic love from the time of the Crusades, recounting the legend of mortal combat between Tancredi, a Christian knight of Normandy, and Clorinda, a Saracen maiden disguised in male armor.

Thereafter, he retired to his home in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, where he passed his last years in the care of his wife, the former Yvonne Patterson, a vivacious dancer and teacher whom he had first met in Ballet Caravan in the late 1930s.