Istvan Rabovsky, a leading Hungarian ballet dancer who stunned audiences in the West with his powerful bravura in 1953 after he and his first wife, the ballerina Nora Kovach, became the first highly-publicized dance defectors from the Communist bloc, died on Aug. 18 in Manhattan. He was 90.
He was hospitalized on Aug. 17 with a gastric ailment, said his wife, Candace Itow.
Trained in Hungary and the Soviet Union, Mr. Rabovsky and Ms. Kovach created a sensation with their technical virtuosity and an energetic style virtually unknown to Western audiences until the Bolshoi Ballet appeared in London and New York in 1956 and 1959.
The Cold War context and headlines provided Mr. Rabovsky and Ms. Kovach with a warm welcome. They had defected from a guest performance in East Berlin in 1953 by taking a train to West Berlin from a subway station under their hotel.
The New York Times, reporting on their London debut with Festival Ballet in 1953, wrote that they received “an ovation of the first magnitude” and after dancing the “Don Quixote Pas de Deux” for 15 minutes, “they spent another 15 minutes taking bows to thunderous applause and receiving giant bouquets of flowers.”
The couple introduced Western audiences to an athletic ballet style that was more fully revealed in the Bolshoi Ballet’s subsequent debuts in the West. If it was clear later that Mr. Rabovsky and Ms. Kovach could not match the artistry of the greatest dancers in the Bolshoi and the Kirov Ballet, they paved the way for these companies, and defectors like Rudolf Nureyev.
In 1956, they were in the headlines again when they were among the passengers rescued from the Andria Doria, an Italian liner that collided off Nantucket with a Swedish ship, the Stockholm.
The couple settled in the United States, where they became respected ballet teachers after they retired from performing in 1970 (they divorced in 1962 but continued to dance together). Ms Kovach died in 2009.
Mr. Rabovsky headed his own schools and dance camps and taught at Dance Theater of Harlem for 15 years. He also choreographed for the company, which presented his acclaimed staging of “Saffron Knot,” an ecstatic duet originally created for Mr. Rabovsky and Ms. Kovach by the American choreographer Harry Asmus.
Mr. Rabovsky and Ms. Kovach played a role in exposing a broad audience to ballet through their television appearances, including seven performances on the Ed Sullivan show. They danced in one of Judy Garland’s variety shows, at Radio City Music Hall, and in night clubs like The Latin Quarter. They also directed their own troupe, Bihari, in 1963 and made guest appearances with ballet companies around the world.
Istvan Rabovsky was born on March 31, 1930 in Szeged, Hungary, and raised partly in Gyomaendrod, a small village in the Hungarian plains. Ms. Itow said his parents were poor and sent him in the summer to live there with his grandmother, a midwife, and his grandfather, a handyman.
Istvan “enjoyed herding goats, geese and water buffalo as a child,” his daughter Lisa Rabbe wrote in a recent email. Because he liked to dance in the streets, she said, his family was persuaded to have him audition for the ballet school of the Budapest State Opera.
Ms. Itow said his parents could not support him and the ballet school arranged for Istvan to live with another family while he was a pupil.
In addition to Ms. Itow, a former ballet dancer, and Ms. Rabbe, Mr. Rabovsky is survived by another daughter, Emese Camanelli, three grandsons and a great-grandson.
As part of their training for the Budapest Ballet, Ms. Kovach and Mr. Rabovsky were selected by Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s major ballerina, to study for six months in Leningrad in 1949-50. There, Ms. Kovach was taken under the wing of Agrippina Vaganova, Soviet Ballet’s most influential teacher, while Mr. Rabovsky worked with Piotr Gusev, who had danced in George Balanchine’s early choreography in the 1920s and became director of both the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballet companies.
Ms. Kovach and Mr. Rabovsky were usually adored by audiences but criticized by some American critics for sacrificing classical form to technical “tricks.” In interviews, however, they reminded readers of these eminent Russian mentors.
Mr. Rabovsky resented being called an “acrobat” and responded in “Leap Through A Curtain” a book about himself and Ms. Kovach: “ I have no apologies to make. I belong to the Russian school and I cannot change my views overnight. I feel that no real dancer can be reproached for being able to leap like an athlete.”
