Aileen Passloff, dancer, choreographer and teacher, dies at age 89
NEW YORK >> Aileen Passloff, whose career as a dancer, choreographer and broadly influential teacher spanned ballet, modern dance and postmodern dance, died Nov. 3 in Manhattan. She was 89.
Her deat h, in hospice care at N YU Langone Health, was caused by heart failure resulting from complications of lung cancer, which had been diagnosed five years ago, according to dancer Charlotte Hendrickson, a friend.
Passloff, a former member of the Judson Dance Theater, the experimental 1960s collective that led to postmodern dance, was devoted to all aspects of the form.
“I don’t remember not dancing,” she said last year in an interview with The New York Times. “I would be set out in the backyard to play, and to play was to dance. For truth.”
“For truth” was her refrain in any conversation. Her thirst for truth and beauty in dance was vast: She was always searching for it — through her own body and through her dancers’ bodies.
“Aileen used the body to understand life in a way that just kind of says hello to the world and celebrates all of what we can be,” dancer and choreographer Arthur Aviles said in a phone interview. “She was helping us to understand our body in relationship to expression — in relationship to nature, life, the ea r th, the sky.”
L i k e Aviles, Hendrickson was a student of Passloff’s at Bard C ollege, where Passloff was co- chair of the dance and drama department from 1969 to 1990. Hendrickson, who went on to dance extensively in Passloff’s works, said she had been insecure when she arrived at Bard’s campus, in the Hudson Valley. Passloff changed that.
Hendrickson was smitten with her as a choreographer as well. She recalled a performance at Bard in which Passloff presented her dance “Paseo,” in which six dancers wear the bata de cola — “the Spanish skirt that drags behind kind of like a wedding gown,” Hendrickson said.
Aileen Passloff was born Oct. 21, 1931, in New York City to Morris and Flora Passloff. She grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens. Her father was a milliner. Her sister, painter Pat Passlof, was a member of the New York School of abstract expressionists. (She dropped the second “f” in her surname after finishing a painting and realizing that she didn’t have room for it on the canvas.)
As a girl, Passloff attended the School of American Ballet, an affiliate of New York City Ballet, and studied with the Russian teacher Anatole Oboukhov. “He taught me how to fly,” Passloff said in 2019.