Barbara Milberg

The daughter of immigrant Ukrainian Jews, Barbara Milberg, reared with her older brother, David, in Brooklyn, was a student of classical piano from childhood. By the age of six she had survived dysentery and pneumonia, and her parents (father, a dentist; mother, a hygienist) enrolled her in ballet lessons to build up her strength. For several years she studied at the School of American Ballet, and, in 1946, at 14 years old, was invited by Balanchine to join Ballet Society, the beginning of her career as a professional dancer, which extended to 1962.[1]

As a child, Milberg began dancing lessons in Brooklyn with a teacher she knew only as "Selma," and subsequently enrolled as a student at the School of American Ballet (SAB) for further training. In the early 1940s, she began to study classical piano with Dorothy Taubman, who prepared her for admission to New York's High School of Music and Art. At SAB, her teachers included Pierre Vladimiroff, Muriel Stuart, Anatole Oboukhov, Felia Doubrovska, and, after joining Ballet Society, Balanchine. Her first performance in Ballet Society was in 1946, as a member of the corps de ballet in Balanchine's Mozart work Symphonie Concertante.[2]

During her twelve years as a member of the New York City Ballet, she danced in the company's regular seasons at the City Center of Music & Drama, in New York, and traveled with NYCB on five extended European tours and three national American tours. She rose from corps de ballet to soloist, performed principal roles in Balanchine's one-act Swan Lake and in Frederick Ashton's Illuminations (as "Profane Love", an erotic role originally choreographed for Melissa Hayden), and danced in the premières of Balanchine ballets still in repertory today. She also danced in ballets by Balanchine that are only occasionally performed now, including his 1948 Orpheus (where she was first a Fury then promoted to Bacchante) and, when not dancing, was a page-turner for Balanchine's rehearsal pianist Nicholas Kopeikine. She performed in the 1954 Arnold Schönberg ballet Opus 34 and, as a soloist, in the 1955 Georges Bizet ballet Roma. She was one of the principal dancers in the 1956 Divertimento No. 15, one of Balanchine's rare Mozart works, and in the 1957 Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration Agon, she danced the Gailliard duet with Barbara Walczak. This was the last new ballet Milberg performed with the company. With NYCB she played the role of Leto in the 1951 revival production of Balanchine's 1928 Apollo and one of the three Ladies of the Night in his choreography for NBC Opera Theatre's production of The Magic Flute, televised in 1956. With Balanchine and NYCB principal Francisco Moncion, Milberg was at Balanchine's invitation a co-choreographer of NYCB's 1955 production of Bizet's Jeux d'Enfants.[3]

Milberg worked with Jerome Robbins, who, as early as 1949, cast her in The Guests, his first ballet for NYCB. In 1958, shortly after her marriage, Robbins invited her to join his newly formed company, Ballets: USA, as a principal dancer. Ballets: USA, which opened Gian-Carlo Menotti's newly organized Spoleto Festival in '58, performed mostly in Europe, including in Athens and Dubrovnik, and Milberg toured with it. Her repertory there included the role of The Butterfly in Robbins's 1956 comic work, The Concert, and the female lead in his pas de deux, Afternoon of a Faun—both roles created for Tanaquil LeClercq. On April 11, 1962, Milberg was among the Ballets: USA dancers who performed for President John F. Kennedy and his wife, the first ballet company to perform at the White House. That was the last performance of her ballet career.

In 2006, Wesleyan University Press published Fisher's book-length memoirs of her years as a dancer, In Balanchine's Company: A Dancer's Memoir. At the time, it was the first book by a Balanchine-and-Robbins dancer to recall in detail the period of Ballet Society and the earliest years of the New York City Ballet. The book received critical praise from the New York Times, dance critic Jack Anderson, who wrote "Barbara Fisher's prose makes the history she lived come alive again",[2] and the book continues to be cited in articles and essays by ballet critics and scholars.

In the mid-1970s, after earning her B.A. and M.A., Fisher taught Freshman English at several colleges while studying for her Ph.D. She received her doctorate in 1980 from the Graduate School of CUNY. She joined the English faculty at City College as an adjunct lecturer and retired from City College, as a full professor, in 2003. She still publishes essays and reviews and attends conferences and scholarly societies, including the Columbia Shakespeare Society, where she is an Associate Member.

Fisher's teaching career began in 1974, first as a Graduate Fellow at Queens College, CUNY, followed by two years at Rutgers University, in Newark, NJ. After receiving her doctorate, she was invited to join the English faculty at City College, where she earned her tenure. At City College, she taught at both graduate and undergraduate levels and designed a number of new courses. She served on the Executive, Library, and Literature Committees, judged entries for the annual English Awards Convocation, and for several years directed the department's English Honors Program. As president of the Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, in 1998, she engaged guest speakers for the semi-annual meetings, including Arlene Croce, then dance critic for The New Yorker, who spoke on "Degas and Balanchine at the Source".

In 1957, she married Howard Shreve Fisher III, with whom she had three children: Alexandra Childs (b. 1961), Benji Nichols (b. 1963), and Samuel Barber (b. 1969). The couple divorced in 1967. She is grandmother of Alice (b. 1992) and Leonard (b. 1994), and currently lives in New York City.

• 1997: Rivkind Fellowship, CUNY (to work on In Balanchine's Company)
• 1989: PSC-CUNY Research Award (to work on "Number, Geometry & Glyphic Coding in Dramatic Fiction")