Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, Sinuous Ballet Dancer and Choreographer, Dies at 82

New York Times

28-04-2025

Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, a star dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet and an elegantly refined principal dancer at New York City Ballet who later nurtured generations of dancers as a teacher and as the director of the Charlotte Ballet, died on April 13 in Charlotte, N.C. He was 82.
His ex-wife, the former City Ballet ballerina Patricia McBride, said the cause of his death, at an assisted-living facility, was heart failure.
Mr. Bonnefoux (pronounced bon-FOO) — or Bonnefous, the name he used professionally during his dancing career — had been an étoile (the word means 'star') at the Paris Opera Ballet for five years when, at 27, he joined City Ballet as a principal dancer in 1970.
He had worked briefly with George Balanchine, the co-founder and principal choreographer of City Ballet, at the Paris Opera in 1963, when the company performed Balanchine's 'The Four Temperaments.' Six years later, Balanchine asked Mr. Bonnefoux to replace an injured dancer in the title role of 'Apollo,' which he was staging at the German Opera Ballet in Berlin.
The four days Mr. Bonnefoux spent with Balanchine, who coached him in the role, were life-changing. 'It gave me the strength to go through 10 more years of dancing,' he told Barbara Newman in an interview for her 1982 book, 'Striking a Balance: Dancers Talk About Dancing.'
Knowing that 'someone like that exists somewhere,' he said, gave him a goal: 'You need to be amazed all the time, to be fresh, to be interested always.'
Mr. Bonnefoux had an additional reason for wanting to join City Ballet. During a guest appearance at a gala with the Eglevsky Ballet on Long Island in 1968, he had fallen for Ms. McBride. It was 'love at first sight,' Ms. McBride said. 'I had never met anyone like him.' They married in 1973.
Over his 10-year career with City Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux performed in a wide range of works, by Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and other choreographers, which showcased his pure classical technique as well as his aptitude for contemporary movement.
'He was so beautiful physically,' Jean-Pierre Frohlich, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet, said in an interview. 'He had a look that was very different to the dancers here, very sophisticated and elegant.'
Although not considered a virtuoso dancer, Mr. Bonnefoux brought a sinuous grace and power to his roles, as well as a sharp theatrical intelligence.
'Mr. Bonnefous shaped the role with a cursive styling that suggested a Japanese woodcut,' Don McDonagh of The New York Times wrote of his performance in Balanchine's 'Bugaku' in 1975. 'He was powerful, but with the litheness of a large cat rather than a blunt muscularity.' Mr. McDonagh added that his reading of the role 'gave it a tactile grace that one sees in well‐formed sculpture.'
Balanchine created roles for Mr. Bonnefoux in 'Stravinsky Violin Concerto' (1972), 'Cortège Hongrois' (1973), 'Sonatine' (1975), 'Union Jack' (1976), 'Étude for Piano' (1977), 'Vienna Waltzes' (1977) and 'Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme' (1979); Robbins created roles for him in 'A Beethoven Pas de Deux' (1973), later known as 'Four Bagatelles,' and 'An Evening's Waltzes' (1973).
In 1977, after noticing that there were no dedicated classes for young boys at the School of American Ballet, Mr. Bonnefoux approached Balanchine about teaching there. 'I wanted the young ones here to feel right away like male dancers and understand the technical differences,' he told The Times.
That same year, he tore all the ligaments in an ankle while performing. During the enforced rest period that followed, encouraged by Balanchine, he began to choreograph.
In 1978, he created 'Pas Degas' as part of City Ballet's French-themed evening 'Tricolore.' ('I have a few things I will have to tell you for your next ballet,' Balanchine remarked after the premiere.) That year, he also created 'Quadrille' for students at the School of American Ballet and 'Une Nuit a Lisbonne' for the Syracuse Ballet.
'This strange time, when it was supposed to be the end for me,' Mr. Bonnefoux told The Times, 'was finally maybe the richest part of my life.'
Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux and his twin sister, Dominique, were born on April 9, 1943, in Bourg-en-Bresse, in eastern France, to Marie Therèse (Bouhy) Bonnefoux and Laurent Bonnefoux, a tax adviser. A few years later, the family moved to Paris, where the twins began to take dance classes.
Jean-Pierre's teacher suggested that he audition for the Paris Opera Ballet School. While studying there, he also pursued acting, appearing in 'Les Fruits Sauvages' (1954), 'Les Diaboliques' (1955), 'Les Carottes Sont Cuites' (1956) and other films.
'At one point, I really didn't know what to do between dance and acting,' he told Ms. Newman.
His parents consulted 'an Indian man, a Hindu, one who could see the future,' he recalled. 'He said very good things about what I would do in ballet.'
In 1957, at 14, he joined the Paris Opera Ballet, then directed by Serge Lifar, a Kyiv-born former star of the Ballets Russes. He disliked Lifar's ballets but loved his teachers, Gérard Mulys, Raymond Franchetti and Serge Peretti, whose examples would later give him a foundation for teaching.
He moved quickly through the ranks of the company, becoming an étoile at 21 and performing lead roles in 19th-century classics like 'Swan Lake,' 'Giselle' and 'Sleeping Beauty,' as well as in ballets by Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart. (Étoile is the only title at the Paris Opera that is bestowed at the discretion of the management.)
Mr. Bonnefoux danced as a guest artist with the Bolshoi Ballet and the Kirov Ballet. He also befriended Rudolf Nureyev and played a part in the Russian dancer's dramatic defection at Paris's Le Bourget airport in 1961. (He telephoned Nureyev's friend Clara Saint to warn her ahead of time that Nureyev was being sent back to Moscow, rather than going on to London with the rest of the Kirov company.)
But, frustrated by mediocre ballets and infrequent performances at the Paris Opera — and inspired by Balanchine — Mr. Bonnefoux decided to leave for City Ballet.
Gradually, he absorbed City Ballet style. It was not, he told Ms. Newman, 'so much a way of moving; it was more about the contact with the music, how you almost precede the music.'
Mr. Bonnefoux retired from City Ballet in 1980. He took the position of ballet master and choreographer at Pittsburgh Ballet Theater and then moved to Bloomington, Ind., to become head of the dance department at Indiana University.
In 1983, he began to run a summer ballet program at the Chautauqua Institution, a gated arts community in the northwestern corner of New York State and the site of the oldest summer arts festival in North America. He brought in prestigious City Ballet alumni like Ms. McBride and Violette Verdy to stage Balanchine pieces, formed a professional summer company and invited a broad variety of choreographers to work with the dancers.
'He was such a good teacher, and he and Patti were a formidable team in Chautauqua,' said Christine Redpath, a former dancer and a repertory director at City Ballet. 'That beautiful French training really fed into his teaching.'
By the time he stepped down in 2021, Mr. Bonnefoux had transformed the summer program into one of the country's most coveted destinations for aspiring dancers.
'He had a quiet presence, but behind his soft accent there was clarity, detail, precision and, always, encouragement,' said Daniel Ulbricht, a City Ballet principal. 'He was part of the reason why I, and many other dancers, were ready to make that commitment to pursuing a career.'
In 1996, Mr. Bonnefoux became the artistic director of what was then called North Carolina Dance Theater, in Charlotte, with Ms. McBride as associate artistic director. He remained there until 2017, and the couple transformed the company into a strong classical troupe that was also a vibrant home for contemporary choreography, adding works by Dwight Rhoden, Alonzo King, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and William Forsythe to the repertoire, as well staging pieces by Balanchine and Robbins.
Mr. Bonnefoux choreographed, too: His ballets included 'Carmina Burana,' 'Peter Pan' and versions of 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'Cinderella' and 'The Nutcracker.'
In 2010, the company opened the Patricia McBride and Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance, housing its rehearsal and administrative spaces as well as a 200-seat theater. Four years later, the company was renamed Charlotte Ballet.
Ms. McBride and Mr. Bonnefoux divorced in 2018, but remained close. He is survived by their children, Christopher Bonnefoux and Melanie (Bonnefoux) DeCoudres, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Bonnefoux's qualities as a director and a teacher were transformative, said Sasha Janes, a former Charlotte Ballet dancer who succeeded Mr. Bonnefoux as director of the School of Dance at Chautauqua.
'He could see things in people they couldn't see in themselves,' Mr. Janes said, adding that Mr. Bonnefoux was ahead of his time: 'He wasn't interested in cookie-cutter perfect dancers; he wanted to see humanity on stage.'