John Barker (ballet)
American dancer, ballet teacher and translator (1929-2020)
John Barker was an American dancer, ballet teacher and translator. He was a leading authority in the West on the Soviet method of teaching classical dance, and the first American to be allowed to teach the method in Russia. He was the official translator, into English, of the textbook of the Leningrad Choreographic School (the Vaganova Academy).
Career
John Barker was a dancer with the Page-Stone Camryn Company, the Chicago Opera Ballet, and the Jose Limon Company. From 1955 to 1956, he danced with the Juilliard Dance Theater. He also danced with the American Ballet Theatre, in numerous summer stock performances of musicals.
Barker ended his career in dance after suffering from several injuries. With the advice from a friend, he started teaching.
In the 1960s, he opened his own ballet school, the John Barker School of Classical Ballet, located at 154 W 56th Street in New York City, across from Carnegie Hall. When he first started teaching, Barker felt that what he was doing was "primitive" and felt that "there must be some better way" of teaching ballet.
“John Barker (ballet)” enters the record as american dancer, ballet teacher and translator (1929-2020). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Barker and ballet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104833431. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955 and 1956.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Barker (ballet)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.