By Sarah Halzack
The Washington Post
Jacques d'Amboise, an exuberant star of the New York City Ballet for three decades and a favorite of its legendarily exacting choreographer George Balanchine before becoming a champion of arts education, died May 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause was complications from a stroke, said his daughter, the actress Charlotte d'Amboise.
Balanchine was famously fixated on women dancers, turning to them as artistic muses and making them the centerpieces of his ballets. D'Amboise, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet from 1953 to 1984, was an exception.
Balanchine created more than a dozen leading roles for him, the most for any male dancer in the company's history.
d'Amboise originated key roles in works such as the upbeat and patriotic "Stars and Stripes" (1958); the minimalist "Episodes" (1959) and "Movements for Piano and Orchestra" (1963); and "Jewels" (1967), a lavish, three-act work with no plot.
Although Balanchine created his classic "Apollo" (1928) for another dancer, d'Amboise's expressive, high-energy rendition of the role became one of the best remembered.
Throughout his career, d'Amboise partnered some of the leading female dancers of his generation, including Suzanne Farrell, Diana Adams, Tanaquil Le Clercqand Allegra Kent. And though d'Amboise choreographed works for the New York City Ballet, it was as a performer that he most enticed audiences with his bravura and raw virtuosity.
"What stayed with me was d'Amboise's matchless delight in moving on a stage," Dance Magazine editor Allan Ulrich wrote in 2007. "You felt he was put on earth for the sole purpose of giving himself and his audience pleasure through dancing. He could execute the most demanding Balanchine combination with a debonair freedom that banished all thought of exhibitionism."
In addition to his career with the elite ballet company, d'Amboise danced on Broadway alongside chanteuse Eartha Kitt in "Shinbone Alley" (1957) and in films including "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954) and the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical "Carousel" (1956).
When d'Amboise started his career as a child, he was living with his parents in Washington Heights, a gritty neighborhood at the northern end of Manhattan. He ran with a local street gang.
"On one side of the street was life as a gangster. On the other side was the ballet," he later told The Washington Post. It was a dichotomy d'Amboise never forgot. In 1976, he worked with his wife, Carolyn George d'Amboise, who was also a dancer, to found National Dance Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides dance education to children.
The goal isn't to churn out top-notch dancers; rather, the New York-based dance institute strives to give students a sense of discipline and expose them to an outlet for creativity and self-expression. d'Amboise said dance kept him out of trouble as a boy, and he wanted his institute to do the same for later generations.
His organization partners with schools to provide dance classes for thousands of students, many of them disadvantaged or disabled. The institute serves thousands of children in New York and thousands more through satellite programs across the country.
A 1983 film about d'Amboise's work at the dance institute, "He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin'," earned an Academy Award for best documentary feature and Emmy Awards for the director, Emile Ardolino, and several producers.
d'Amboise received some of the arts world's most coveted prizes, including the 1998 National Medal of Arts, 1995 Kennedy Center Honors and a 1990 MacArthur Foundation Award, often called "the genius grant."
With his peers and his students, d'Amboise placed a premium on dance's power of expressing individuality. "A thousand instruments can play a high C at the same time, and it's all the same, but a thousand people pointing - directly the same way - is a thousand different gestures," he told a reporter in 1991. "A different length of arm. A different personality. There are as many different ways of dancing as there are people."
Joseph Jacques Ahearn was born July 28, 1934, in Dedham, Mass., to Georgette d'Amboise, a nurse's aide, and Patrick Ahearn, an elevator operator.
When d'Amboise was 7, his mother enrolled him and his older sister Ninette in a ballet class. To get the rambunctious boy to pay attention, d'Amboise's teacher told him to focus on jumping higher than the girls. That directive got him to concentrate on the steps instead of putting his energy into disrupting the class.
After noticing his unusual talent, the teacher encouraged d'Amboise's mother to take him to the more challenging School of the American Ballet, the education arm of Balanchine's New York City Ballet.
The choreographer instantly took a liking to d'Amboise. "I was performing right away, at 8 years old. Balanchine was doing a little thing for some rich man's party in the summer and I was Puck in 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' and I got 10 bucks. So that's very seductive," he told NPR in 2010.
By the time he was 15, d'Amboise had become a member of the nascent New York City Ballet.
A 1958 New York Times review of one of his performances described a well-balanced artist, one who was "graceful and elegant as a partner, yet capable of all the breathtaking jumps, leaps and spins which set an audience to shouting."
Balanchine was so enamored with d'Amboise's talent that he found ways to keep the dancer onstage long after his prime. "If I couldn't lift, because a shoulder had been torn muscle and I didn't have the strength anymore, he would not do a lift," d'Amboise once said in an interview. "He'd do something else. He'd choreograph around me."
Even as he aged and his capabilities dwindled, d'Amboise dazzled critics. In a 1979 review, Times dance critic Jennifer Dunning wrote, "His quietly expert handling of Miss Farrell in the ballet's tumbled lifts recalls his reputation as one of the most secure and sensitive partners around. If the signature breezy jumps and insouciant turns are not part of this ballet, there was still d'Amboise's familiar, attentive lunge and jazz dancer's taut grace and joy."
Within the ranks of New York City Ballet, d'Amboise met Carolyn George, a fellow dancer who would become his wife. "I fell in love immediately the first minute she appeared in ballet class," he told the Associated Press in 2009. "She was very young and silly -- like a young horse, an American filly."
The couple wed in 1956 and remained married until her death in 2009. Survivors include four children, George, Christopher and twin daughters Catherine and Charlotte; and six grandchildren. A testament to their parents' influence, Christopher became a ballet dancer and choreographer and Charlotte earned two Tony nominations as a Broadway performer.
D'Amboise's children played a key role in setting him on the path of dance educator. When his sons were young, d'Amboise wanted to expose them to dance, but didn't want them to endure schoolyard taunts for doing something often stereotyped as feminine.
He began offering free, boys-only ballet classes on Saturday mornings in a spare room at their school. Soon, using $3,000 of his own money, he launched the National Dance Institute, which, in its early days, only offered classes to boys. (Today, the program serves boys and girls.) The inaugural group had only 30 children.
Still, d'Amboise's mentor was a supporter from the beginning. "It's a great thing Jacques does," Balanchine told the Times in 1981. "He is better than any psychiatrist. He takes self-consciousness away from the children."
For the rest of his life, d'Amboise remained a tireless champion for his institute and its mission. In 1999, he embarked on one of his most attention-grabbing fundraising ideas: hiking all 2,160 miles of the Appalachian Trail while stopping along the way at schools, community centers, and even a prison to teach dance and collect donations.
He was 65 at the time, suffered from arthritis and had endured three knee surgeries and a foot operation.
"Some of that trail in Maine, I was on my hands and knees crawling like a crab," he told the Asbury Park Press.
Still, d'Amboise completed the hike and raised about $600,000 for his organization.reporter.