Mark Ryder, a prominent dancer in Martha Graham’s company in the 1940s who went on to form his own company and to teach modern dance at several colleges, died July 13 in Columbia, Md. He was 85.
His death was announced by his wife, Mary Ratcliffe.
Mr. Ryder was on the faculty of the dance department at the University of Maryland for 14 years. He served briefly as the chairman of the department in the 1970s and retired in 1988. In the 1960s, he taught at Goddard College, an experimental college in Vermont, where he strongly encouraged one of his students, David Mamet, to become a playwright.
In an era when American modern dance had just emerged from a pioneering phase, Mr. Ryder’s career followed a typical course. Trained and influenced by a mentor–in this case, Martha Graham–Mr. Ryder broke away to perform his own choreography. After dancing with Graham’s company for a decade, he formed the Dance Drama Duo with his first wife, Emily Frankel, in the 1950s. The popular touring troupe expanded into the Dance Drama Company and also featured works by other choreographers.
He was born Sasha Liebich in Chicago and grew up in New York, where he began studying dance as a child at the Neighborhood Playhouse, a settlement house where Graham taught. She invited him into her company, which was in residence annually at the Bennington College summer school and dance festival in Bennington, Vt. Mr. Ryder first danced with the Martha Graham Group, as it was called, in 1940 and then at Bennington in 1941 and 1942.
After service in the Army, which included taking part in the Normandy invasion, Mr. Ryder returned to the company and danced major roles in premieres. He appeared opposite Graham as the Creature of Fear, the Minotaur figure that Graham battled in “Errand Into the Maze,” and as the blind seer Tiresias in “Night Journey,” her portrait of Jocasta.
In 1947, Walter Terry, dance critic of The New York Herald Tribune, called Mr. Ryder “splendid” as the seer: “He makes the figure at once inexorable and sympathetic, a link between the decrees of fate and the hopes of man.”
Mr. Ryder’s marriages to Frankel and Ann Dumaresq ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Ratcliffe, of Columbia, Md.; three daughters from his second marriage, and a granddaughter.
Mr. Ryder’s thinking as an artist and a teacher was summed up when he told Sali Ann Kriegsman in her book, “Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years” (1981), that John Dewey’s educational philosophy of “involving people in the process as part of educating them to be able to do things was fundamental to dance.” He added, “Dance does very well in the Deweyan mode because you learn by doing.” At Bennington, he said, “there was enormous provision for doing.”
