Paul Sanasardo, the forgotten one (except by Pina Bausch)
- Jean-Marc Adolphe
- 3 hours ago
- 10 min read
Paul Sanasardo. Photo Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Author of "excellent, unpleasant dances," as one critic put it, Paul Sanasardo was one of the lesser-known figures in American modern dance. He died on July 23, 2026, at the age of 97. This choreographer from Chicago, trained in painting and then in dance under Martha Graham and Antony Tudor, invented, with Donya Feuer, an intense, dreamlike, and often brutal theater of the body. In Europe, his name remains almost unknown—with the notable exception of Pina Bausch, who was his young stage and creative partner in New York.
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In France, and more broadly in Europe, he is unknown. Never invited by a single theater or festival. Yet he was one of the major artists of the 20th century. But he arrived too early, or too late, caughtbetween Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.
Unknown, therefore, except to a few, for whom his name was more than a reference: a legend.
It was the choreographer Jacques Patarozzi, who died in January 2023 ( HERE ), who first introduced me to Paul Sanasardo (photo opposite: Jack Mitchell). As Rosita Boisseau recounted in Le Monde , it was with Paul Sanasardo, in the United States, in the very early 1970s, that Jacques Patarozzi met Pina Bausch, before joining her in Wuppertal in 1975 for the creation of The Rite of Spring , alongside another itinerant French dancer, Dominique Mercy, who would later become one of the emblematic performers of the Tanztheater Wuppertal.
In 1958, Pina Bausch was 18 years old when she undertook, alone and without speaking a word of English, to cross the Atlantic by boat, the journey took eight days – to go to New York to complete her training at the Juilliard School, encouraged by Kurt Jooss, who had returned to Germany after the war to take over the direction of the dance department of the Folkwangschule in Essen, then housed in a former Benedictine abbey. [1]
“Jooss organized summer courses in Essen,” Pina Bausch recounts, “where he always invited many other artists, Antony Tudor, and Lucas Hoving, who was a top-tier dancer, and José Limón… the José Limón company was then touring in Düsseldorf… and many jazz teachers, and Vera Volkova, and Alvin Nikolais, and Pearl Lang, who was a wonderful Graham dancer. They were all there… Lucas Hoving sometimes for three months… and they gave their classes. It was there, naturally, that I developed a taste for the most diverse things, like the Graham technique. And a great desire to learn, simply to always learn more. And then I tried to get a scholarship.”
In the interview she gave me in March 2006 [2] , I asked Pina Bausch about the circumstances that led her to meet Paul Sanasardo:
“At the Juilliard School, Antony Tudor taught, along with other masters like Margaret Craske and Alfred Corvino. And they all taught at the Met [the Metropolitan Opera in New York]. So I went to the Met to train with them, as well as in the classes of Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo. One day, they approached me. I couldn't understand anything, but they were incredibly kind and invited me to their studio. They always held classes there in the evenings, I joined them, and after class, at night, they prepared their pieces. They spent their days working, and in the evenings, at night, they lived. They immediately wanted me to participate in their pieces, and I immediately started working with them. They then became two close friends of mine…”
It was within the small collective formed by Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer that Pina Bausch participated, in New York, in her first experiences of choreographic creation: Phases of Madness then In View of God .
In an interview conducted three years ago by Jenai Cutcher for the Chicago Dance History Project (see below), Paul Sanasardo gives his own version [Sanasardo remembered that Bausch had wanted to leave Juilliard and would have lost her scholarship had she done so. Later accounts establish, however, that she completed her one-year grant at the school] :
“Pearl Lang [a former leading dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, she taught at Juilliard from 1951 to 1969 and founded her own company, the Pearl Lang Dance Theater ] had gone to teach in Essen and told Kurt Jooss, ‘This young girl is very talented.’ Jooss was growing old, and arranged for her to go to New York on a Juilliard scholarship. There, Pina studied with Tudor, Anna Sokolow, and Limón, but she didn’t like anything academic. One day, Tudor came to see me: ‘There’s this very good student at Juilliard. I think you’ll like her. She’s German, very serious.’ She wanted to leave Juilliard; by leaving, she would lose her scholarship. So Tudor told her, ‘Don’t get your hopes up, you’re not a ballet dancer, but you can earn some money here.’ Then: ‘I want you to meet Paul.’”
Donnie [Feuer] and I had just begun working together. Tudor said to us, “I think you should work together.” I invited Pina to the studio. She came one evening; she only took one class with me. I had seen her in Tudor's class: she was remarkable. Then I asked her if she wanted to work with us. Pina more or less moved in with us. She took Tudor’s morning class, then went to her work at the Met; afterwards, we would work together. She would come back late at night, and we would rehearse at midnight in the studio.
That's how we started. The first piece was a trio, for the three of us, Phases of Madness. On stage, we roughed each other up until we turned red. It was a very rough piece. Pina already had that violence, those bodies colliding… »
Interview with Paul Sanasardo for the Chicago Dance History Project (2023).
A life of dance
Paul Sanasardo died on July 23, 2026, in Park Ridge, a residential suburb northwest of Chicago. He was 97 years old.
Born in Chicago in 1928 to a Sicilian family originally from Palermo, he first studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before training in dance under Antony Tudor and Martha Graham. He made his professional debut in 1952 with the Erika Thimey Dance Theater, then danced with Anna Sokolow in 1955, and later with Pearl Lang, notably in 1957 and 1964. He also performed at the New York City Opera and in several Broadway musicals. In 1957, with Donya Feuer, he founded the Paul Sanasardo-Donya Feuer Dance Company. The following year, the two artists created the Studio for Dance , which later became Modern Dance Artists Inc .: a school, rehearsal space, living space, and creative laboratory all in one.
Early on, Sanasardo and Feuer rented three floors of a loft above a cardboard factory on West 19th Street in Manhattan. They lived and taught there. Some children enrolled in their classes stayed over the weekend, sleeping in sleeping bags to work with them. Several would appear in their works, which were anything but conventional children's theater. In 1963, Donya Feuer left for Stockholm, where she joined the Royal Dramatic Theatre and would work intensively with Ingmar Bergman for three decades. For Sanasardo, it was the end of an exceptional creative partnership—but not of a choreographic adventure that would continue for many years to come.
Paul Sanasardo's company in 1982. Photo David Fullard
From New York to Tel Aviv
In 1970, Paul Sanasardo received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the Creative Arts. In 1977, he was appointed artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, a position he held until 1980. For Batsheva, he created, among other works, Step by Step with Haydn , Abandoned Prayer , Meditation on an Open Stage and Lisztdelirium (1978), then Stravinsky Dance Circus (1979), Songs and The Spirit of Babi-Yar (1980).
Returning to the United States in 1981, he resumed directing his company, which, until its dissolution in 1986, was housed in a studio on the second floor of a building on 21st Street in Manhattan. After 1986, Paul Sanasardo continued his work as a teacher and guest choreographer with various companies. His works entered or remained in the repertoire of ensembles such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Nederlands Dans Theater.
Among several dozen pieces, Metallics (1963), a work of intense sexual tension set to an electronic score by Henry Cowell, was notably revived by these two companies. In 1971, critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote in the New York Times that it was "impossible not to respect Paul Sanasardo as a choreographer" : "an uncompromising artist" who "combines purity of movement with emotional depth."
In the 1980s, some of his works took on a more lyrical and lighter tone. But his art retained what one of his critics called its strength of "excellent unpleasant dances" : bodies exposed, mistreated, subjected to relationships of desire, violence or power.
Paul Sanasardo in the solo Pain (1970)
"Passionate, determined"
American dancer, choreographer, and teacher Bill Evans, born in 1940, knew Paul Sanasardo for decades. In a tribute published after his death, he remembered him as "a passionate, determined, frank, and eccentric man." At the beginning of the Repertory Dance Theatre in Salt Lake City, Evans and his colleagues asked critic Clive Barnes to recommend a New York teacher of modern technique. "He immediately suggested Sanasardo," he recounted. Paul Sanasardo was then invited for two extended residencies.
During his first residency, he created Fatal Birds . During rehearsals, Bill Evans recalled, Sanasardo would spread his long arms “like menacing wings,” lower himself into a wide plié , and shout “ woom, woom! ” For his second residency, Sanasardo created Earth for the entire company. The set consisted of long cardboard tubes, of the kind used to ship carpets; some, painted like tree trunks, were suspended above the stage. The dancers set them in motion by walking past or manipulating them. The men's costumes, Bill Evans recounted, were inspired by the United Airlines uniforms that Sanasardo had noticed during his flight from New York. “It was an exhilarating and exciting piece to dance,” he wrote. The Repertory Dance Theatre presented it in 1969 at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. After a performance, Bill Evans overheard Antony Tudor asking Paul Sanasardo, "But what does it all mean?"
Prior to this week in Central Park, the Repertory Dance Theatre had performed in Saratoga Springs, at Sanasardo's invitation, for the inaugural season of a modern dance program he had helped create and directed at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. After the Delacorte, Bill Evans, Joan Moon, and Gregg Lizenbery stayed at Anna Sokolow's apartment on Christopher Street and attended Sanasardo's classes.
This memory perhaps clarifies what Paul Sanasardo was for those who met him: not just a choreographer of the in-between, caught between Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, nor a name relegated to the margins of the history of American modern dance, but a creator whose extraordinary work ethic, exacting standards and strangeness have left a lasting mark on his performers.
Douglas Nielsen and Paul Sanasardo. Photo Mula Eshet
Back to painting
Dance was not Paul Sanasardo’s first calling. In Chicago, he initially trained as a visual artist, graduating in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952. A lecture by Martha Graham altered the course of his life; the following year, he made his professional debut as a dancer.
Paul Sanasardo, "Biomorphic Abstract", 1992.
Painting, however, never entirely vanished from his life. After disbanding his company in the mid-1980s, Sanasardo returned to Chicago, continued teaching and resumed painting. Dominique Petit, the French dancer and choreographer who had danced with his company in the early 1970s, recalled: “He had gone to art school in Chicago […] he returned to Chicago, where he continued to teach and took up painting again.”
Paul Sanasardo, Untitled, 1995.
Only scattered traces of this later visual work remain readily accessible: a work held by the Tucson Museum of Art, a few paintings that have surfaced on the market, and little archival material from which to reconstruct a chronology, identify series or map exhibitions. That scarcity echoes his choreographic fate: a major body of work long left outside the dominant narratives, whose surviving fragments now call for a patient rediscovery.
Paul Sanasardo, Untitled, 1991
His return to painting should perhaps be understood not as a retirement, but as a continuation. The artist who had brought bodies marked by desire, anguish, violence and tenderness to the stage returned to the silence of the canvas. Between painting and choreography, Paul Sanasardo never ceased to compose presences, tensions and images.
Jean-Marc Adolphe
NOTES
[1] The Folkwangschule for music, dance, and spoken word opened on October 8, 1927, at 34 Friedrichstraße in Essen. Kurt Jooss was a co-founder, along with, among others, the stage director Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg, the conductor Max Fiedler, and the set designer Hein Heckroth; he immediately took over the direction of the dance department. The project extended an experiment conducted in Münster since 1925 with his close collaborator Sigurd Leeder: bringing together music, spoken word, movement, and theatrical practice under one roof. This transdisciplinary approach was then unparalleled in Germany for the professional training of dancers.
Jooss, trained in the wake of Rudolf Laban, did not strictly separate classical dance, Ausdruckstanz — expressive dance — and theatre. He sought a precise relationship between the performer's inner world, movement, form and space; this articulation nourished both his teaching and his choreographies.
In 1928, he founded the Folkwang-Tanztheater-Studio within the school , an experimental group combining training and creation. Two years later, he also took over the direction of the Essen Opera Ballet, giving the city a particularly unique structure where school, company, and theater interacted. In 1933, the Nazi authorities demanded that Jooss remove the Jewish members of his company. He refused and hastily left Germany with his group; he continued his work in exile, notably at Dartington Hall in England, with the Jooss-Leeder School. He returned to Essen after the war and, in 1949, resumed his position as director of the dance department at the Folkwangschule, then housed in the former Benedictine abbey of Essen-Werden. He taught there until his retirement in the late 1960s; the school was granted higher education status in 1963.
[2] “I’ve never given such a long interview ,” Pina Bausch said with a laugh, at the end of this interview conducted on March 1, 2006 , in Wuppertal, with Michel Bataillon, who translated it from German to French. It was the last major interview during her lifetime (Pina Bausch died on June 30, 2009), intended for Guy Delahaye’s book of photographs, published by Actes Sud in 2007 (reissued in 2018).
Read: "Dominique Petit: The Journey of a French Dancer in the United States, Encounters and Connections – No. 2. Years 1972-1973: Becoming a Professional Dancer with Paul Sanasardo," interview by Maëva Lamolière. https://journals.openedition.org/danse/4464
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