NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Istvan Rabovsky, a leading Hungarian ballet dancer who stunned audiences in the West with his bravura in 1953 after he and his first wife, ballerina Nora Kovach, became the first highly publicized dance defectors from the communist bloc, died Aug. 18 in Manhattan. He was 90.

He was hospitalized Aug. 17 with a gastric ailment, said his wife, Candace Itow.

Trained in Hungary and the Soviet Union, Rabovsky and 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 Rabovsky and 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 Rabovsky and 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, Massachusetts, 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). Kovach died in 2009.




Rabovsky headed his own schools and dance camps and taught at Dance Theatre 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 Rabovsky and Kovach by U.S. choreographer Harry Asmus.

Rabovsky and 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 nightclubs 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. 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.

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 Itow, a former ballet dancer, and Rabbe, Rabovsky is survived by another daughter, Emese Camanelli, three grandsons and a great-grandson.

As part of their training for the Budapest Ballet, Kovach and Rabovsky were selected by Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s major ballerina, to study for six months in Leningrad in 1949-50. There, Kovach was taken under the wing of Agrippina Vaganova, Soviet Ballet’s most influential teacher, while 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.

Kovach and Rabovsky were usually adored by audiences, but some U.S. critics accused them of sacrificing classical form to technical “tricks.” Rabovsky resented being called an “acrobat” and responded in “Leap Through a Curtain,” a book about him and 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.”

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