Maggie Black, who for decades earned renown for teaching famous ballet and modern dancers how to leap and turn in ways, as she put it, that “humans weren’t really made to do,” configuring their bodies to avoid injuries and even to heal them, died on May 11 at her home in East Hampton, N.Y. She was 85.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Gary Chryst, a friend, former student and principal dancer of the Joffrey Ballet.
From the 1960s to the ’90s, Ms. Black’s classes were studded with star dancers and choreographers from American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, the Joffrey, Dance Theater of Harlem, the Paul Taylor Dance Company and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
Among them were Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown, Eliot Feld, William Forsythe, Gelsey Kirkland, Tina LeBlanc, Lar Lubovitch, Natalia Makarova, Kevin McKenzie, Ohad Naharin, Lawrence Rhodes and Martine Van Hamel.
Ms. Black and David Howard, a former soloist with the Royal Ballet in Britain, who died in 2013, were among the nation’s most sought-after ballet teachers.
“She knew the body and how to carry your weight with the least effort and no strain,” her former husband, the actor Joseph Ragno, wrote to a neighbor of hers, Arthur Wolf. “That was her contribution. So dancers from all the disciplines — classical ballet, modern, Broadway, jazz — came to her classes for the purity of her method, and she treated them all as equals and loved and helped them all.”
Margaret Black was born on March 31, 1930, in Central Falls, R.I., the daughter of William Henderson Black and the former Elizabeth Aberly. Her aunt took her to ballet classes as a child.
“She left home at 16 and danced around the world and never came back,” said Douglas Black, her nephew. He and his sister survive her.
She made her debut at the old Roxy Theater in Manhattan’s theater district and danced with the Cleveland Civic Ballet, the London Theater Ballet and Ballet Rambert in Britain, where she also studied with Audrey de Vos. She returned to New York and performed with American Ballet Theater before leaving again for Ballet Alicia Alonso in Cuba. She came back to dance with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.
The Met’s ballet school was directed by the choreographer Antony Tudor, who invited Ms. Black, when she was 30, to accompany him when he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School.
“The hardest thing for a performer to do,” she once told Connoisseur magazine, “is to give up performing and move on to the next stage, whatever it may be.”
Though she had traveled the world, her New England roots were always present. “Her voice combines an impenetrable Rhode Island accent with the volume of a New England foghorn,” Joseph Carman wrote in Dance magazine in 2004.
For Ms. Black, teaching “was her own genius,” Mr. Chryst said in an interview.
“She taught us anatomically to dance within our own limitations and to be very clear with our movement through our own individuality,” he said. “And she would say, ‘I like to work on movement, but can’t until we are standing correctly.’ ”
She taught 50 or more students at a time in lofts near Lincoln Center and in Times Square.
“She emphasized natural ability and simplicity in movement, and she threw out the old-school notion that every dancer — regardless of facility — must have the same physicality and look,” Rachel Straus, who teaches dance history at Juilliard, wrote in Dance Teacher magazine in 2012. “Black stressed that dancers maintain ‘square’ hips, so as not to skew alignment in favor of extensions, and her words ‘Up, up, up!’ were code for vertically aligning the pelvis.”
Mr. McKenzie, the artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said Ms. Black had a cleareyed understanding of the teacher’s role. “The most revealing thing she ever said to me,” he said, “was at a time I was becoming too reliant on her: ‘You don’t seem to understand that I will only view myself a success when you realize you no longer need my guidance.’ ”
Ms. Black retired to Long Island in 1995 and rejected offers to teach a one-time master class or to market videos, insisting that dancers could learn only through sustained, hands-on teaching.
Mr. Carman recalled that George Balanchine, the artistic director of New York City Ballet, begrudgingly bestowed the epithet Black Magic on Ms. Black when some of his dancers defected to her classes.
“One particular N.Y.C.B. corps girl with a noodley back, a wayward center and haphazard turns studied with Black for a concentrated period,” he wrote. “When she returned to Mr. B’s class, across the floor she sped in a moving allegro combination, executing triple pirouettes. ‘Black Magic,’ sniffed Mr. B. And from then on, that was his nickname for the sorceress on W. 46th Street.”
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