Janet Panetta, 74; admired dancer, choreographer, teacher
NEW YORK — Janet Panetta, who overcame childhood polio to become a dancer with American Ballet Theater, a performer in New York’s thriving downtown modern dance scene and a revered ballet teacher, died Dec. 2 in Brooklyn. She was 74.
Her husband, Jeffrey Roth, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was brain cancer.
At the peak of her five-decade teaching career, which began in 1973 and lasted until a few months before her death, Ms. Panetta, who lived in Manhattan, spent half of each year in Europe teaching her signature method, which she called Ballet for Contemporary Dancers.
She taught at prestigious institutions like P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels and at Vienna’s ImPulsTanz festival. And for two decades she was a vital presence in Pina Bausch’s company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, where she taught daily ballet classes at the company’s studio in Wuppertal, in western Germany, and on its worldwide tours.
“Pina held Janet in high regard,” Barbara Kaufmann, a Tanztheater dancer and rehearsal director, wrote in an email. “Her ballet technique was outstanding, and she observed profoundly what every individual needed as a dancer and artist.” (Bausch died in 2009.)
Dancers also flocked to Panetta Movement Center, the studio Ms. Panetta opened in 2003 in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. On any given day her class might include members of the Merce Cunningham and Jose Limón companies, independent artists seeking ballet lessons free of traditional formality, and neoburlesque performers helping to revive that genre.
Her classes adapted the rigor of classical ballet to promote healthy alignment rather than forcing the body into balletic extremes.
While Ms. Panetta had an eye for technical detail, she made ballet accessible to contemporary dancers and framed it as a tool for expressing individuality.
“Ballet is an art form, a major study, and we are all supplicants,” she said in an interview with the Times. “I try to stay away from esoteric language in the studio, but I know the experience is happening on profound levels.”
French choreographer Jérôme Bel, also interviewed by the Times in 2010, said of Ms. Panetta, “If a dancer would be a rocket, she would be a launchpad.” He was her student at the National Center of Contemporary Dance in France, where she was the founding ballet teacher in the early 1980s.
In 2008, Ms. Panetta received a Martha Hill Dance Fund MidCareer Award in recognition of her growing influence in the field.
As a performer in New York’s modern dance world, she was an original member of dancer and choreographer Paul Sanasardo’s company. She also danced with avant-garde choreographers such as Neil Greenberg and Susan Salinger and performed her own original works.
Times critic Jennifer Dunning wrote in 1989 that Ms. Panetta “is quietly indelible onstage, intense and sharply focused, with a smoky, smoldering aura.” That was equally true offstage; stories abound of Ms. Panetta entering the studio wearing black leather and puffing on a cigarette.
Janet Elizabeth Panetta was born on Dec. 12, 1948, in Brooklyn. Her father, Vincent, was a Wall Street accountant, and her mother, Mary (Esposito) Panetta, sold cosmetics at the Wanamaker’s department store in Manhattan.
Ms. Panetta contracted polio in early childhood, and it was severe enough to require an iron lung. When a doctor prescribed exercise to strengthen her weakened left side, the Panettas enrolled her, at 6 years old, in a local dance studio. Janet thrived, and her talent led her to the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, where her teachers included British ballet luminaries Antony Tudor and Margaret Craske.
In a 2008 interview with Dance Enthusiast, Ms. Panetta recalled that when students made mistakes, the strict Craske would throw them out of the classroom, a punishment she received “all the time,” she said.
Those brief expulsions fueled her determination to improve, and she spent her timeouts diligently practicing in a dressing room. By age 14, she was such a strong technician that Craske hired her as a teaching assistant, planting the seed of her future career.
“I realized,” Ms. Panetta said, “that teaching was an opportunity to learn.”