Los Angeles Times (CA) - August 10, 2002
Meredith Baylis, a former dancer in the fabled Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo who went on to become a noted teacher in the Joffrey Ballet School and then taught for two decades in Southern California, has died. She was 73.
Baylis died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank on July 26 of complications from heart surgery.
In the 1951-52 season, she joined the Ballets Russes, then the world's most glamorous classical dance company, dancing featured roles and later working as a coach for the company until its closure in 1962. "The Ballets Russes was the first blending of the Old World and the New World in ballet," she told dance historian Jack Anderson when he was researching a book on the company. "It linked St. Petersburg [Russia] with America and Canada."
Five years after the Ballets Russes folded, she was teaching at the Joffrey Ballet School in New York City, formed as a training adjunct to the ballet company founded by Robert Joffrey. Baylis taught there for more than 20 years, pioneering the teaching of ballet to deaf children. In 1979, she chose Ron Reagan to be a scholarship student, not knowing that he was the president's son.
She left Joffrey in the 1980s and returned to Burbank to care for her father, continuing to teach on her own and with other Ballets Russes alumnae.
She is survived by a brother, Richard Baylis of Huntington Beach.
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