San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Oakland native brought ballet home
Ronn Guidi was sitting in class at Laurel Elementary in Oakland, as bored as a fourthgrader could be, when his teacher tried enlivening the day's lessons by putting on a classical record and passing around a ballet program.
When the program reached Guidi at his desk, he was transfixed by its cover image of an athletic male dancer leaping over a woman in a tutu.
Guidi later told friends he decided then and there to someday be that male dancer in the picture, and give kids like himself that same jolt of inspiration.
Guidi went on to become a fourth-grade teacher in Oakland public schools, and in 1965 he founded Oakland Ballet Company. A few years later he opened his own studio to feed dancers and product to his company. The fortunes of the innovative troupe, dedicated to the works of legendary Parisian company Ballets Russes, waxed and waned for more than than 40 years before Guidi finally retired from his company in 2009.
Guidi, who did as much as anyone to keep Oakland alive as a center for dance, died Thanksgiving afternoon, one week after suffering a fall at his home in Oakland, the only city he had ever lived in, discounting his two years in the Army. The cause of death was a brain bleed, said his sister, Yvonne Evans of Oakland. He was 85.
“Ron wanted to create a company in Oakland that would reflect the diversity of the city,” said longtime Oakland Ballet company dancer Ron Thiele. “It was for people like him, who had never considered the arts as an outlet. His whole thing was about expressing through dance the human condition, no matter what it was.”
This concept, which Guidi had an outsize role in crystallizing, made his company an influential force nationwide from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. At its peak, Oakland Ballet employed 28 full-time dancers performing a mix of classic story ballets and original commissions on its home stage, the Paramount Theatre, and on tour in all 50 states, and in Canada, Mexico, Italy and France.
Guidi choreographed his own versions of “Nutcracker,” “Hansel & Gretel” and “Trois Gymnopedes.” In the 1980s, he invited Oakland A's manager Tony La Russa and prominent A's players like Dave Stewart and Mark McGwire to join the cast of “Nutcracker,” and over the years many prominent Bay Area sports figures took part in the annual production.
“That was an example of making ballet accessible to everyone in the community,” Thiele said. “You'd see people there from all walks of life. Some were wearing A's caps. It was all part of Ronn's vision to open the theater up to everybody.”
Ronald Paul Guidi was born July 10, 1936, in Oakland and grew up in the Redwood Heights area of the Oakland hills. His father was an Italian immigrant who trained as a boxer and worked the assembly line at the GM plant in Fremont. His mother ran a dinette called Blanche's Cafe in Oakland. In their off hours they ballroom-danced to the radio in the kitchen. According to Evans, her older brother Ronn would attempt to dance alongside his parents until they shooed him outside to do his dancing in the yard. Finally they enrolled him in dance school under Raoul Pause who ran the Oakland Civic Ballet.
Guidi attended Laurel Elementary, Bret Harte Middle School and Oakland High School. He graduated in 1954, then continued to live with his parents while earning his bachelor's degree in education from UC Berkeley.
Out of student deferments, he was immediately drafted into the Army and served two years overseas. Upon his release he
“At times he was childlike, but he was also charming, fun and serious — all of the adjectives you can think of that make for a very interesting person.”
Betsy Erickson, dancer
returned home to Oakland and got a job teaching at Glenview Elementary. From there it was a natural segue to opening a dance studio.
Somewhere along the way he added a second n to his first name. “He wanted to be unique,” his sister said, “and he was definitely unique.”
Guidi’s first studio, Oakland Ballet Academy, was on Foothill Boulevard in East Oakland. Later he moved to a laundromat on MacArthur Boulevard that he converted by installing a wood floor over the concrete slab. He taught courses all over Oakland and Berkeley, and wherever he taught he looked for talent. Ron Thiele was a pitcher on the freshman baseball team at Cal when curiosity drew him in to watch a dance class Guidi was teaching at Hearst Memorial Gymnasium.
“Ronn came over and said ‘take off your boots and let me see your feet,” Thiele recalls. “I didn’t stop dancing for 30 years.”
Guidi’s Oakland Ballet Company supplanted Pause’s Oakland Civic Ballet and attracted talent like Betsy Erickson, who joined the company as ballet mistress in 1994, following a 20-year career as a principal dancer with the San Francisco Ballet.
“The Oakland Ballet had a real place in the dance scene because it was performing ballets that weren’t being performed by anyone else and keeping that tradition alive in a beautiful way,” Erickson said. “Ronn was one to look for detail and character and style and drama. He was very involved in that.”
Guidi was fastidious, and his unwillingness to cut corners led to financial problems for the ballet company.
“It was definitely shoestring, but Ronn made it happen,” Erickson said. “That was the miracle of it.”
In 1998, Guidi quit as artistic director of his own company after scrawling a resignation letter on a cocktail napkin backstage during a performance of “The Nutcracker.” The company later went into decline, but Guidi returned in 2007 to rescue it in heroic fashion. Two years later he quit again, this time for good.
“He was mercurial and unpredictable at times, but so very warm and friendly,” Erickson said. “At times he was childlike, but he was also charming, fun and serious — all of the adjectives you can think of that make for a very interesting person.”
According to his sister, Guidi lived for more than 60 years in a house he had purchased in the Montclair neighborhood. During the Oakland firestorm in 1991
the flames stopped a block from his house. But during the power outages a year ago a generator sparked a neighbor’s house and Guidi arrived from a morning trip to the grocery store to find his house in flames.
The house was saved but incurred major damage and Guidi lost his beloved aviary, which included a variety of colorful finches.
He had been living in an apartment ever since. Though he had retired from choreographing and no longer had his own studio, he was incapable of retiring from the urge to teach. When COVID-19 closed the various studios where he taught, Guidi commandeered his sister’s back patio in the Oakland hills. He was allowed to have six students per class, and they always filled up.
“Ballet was Ronn’s whole life, and he lived it every day,” his sister said. Guidi had catchphrases to encourage the constant repetition that made for a successful dancer, and 60 years after he started, he was still using those same phrases of encouragement.
“One more time, loves,” was his favorite, and his sister overheard him saying it to students on her patio.
Guidi was a practicing Catholic and attended St. Margaret Mary in Oakland, where the evening Mass was in Latin. A memorial service to be held there is pending.
Guidi was predeceased by his brother, Louis Guidi Jr. He is survived by his sister, Yvonne Evans of Oakland, and several nieces and nephews.
He is also survived by the Oakland Ballet, now in its 56th season, and the Ronn Guidi Foundation for Dance, a nonprofit Guidi created when he left the company in 2009. It provides funding for other small dance companies. Donations in his name may be made to the Ronn Guidi Foundation for Dance, 490 Lake Park Ave., No.10653, Oakland, CA 94610