Photo by Steve Caras: Bart Cook with Maria Calegari. 

Bart Cook is a highly regarded dance professional, not only as a former principal dancer and ballet master for New York City Ballet (1971–1993), but as a repetiteur for both the George Balanchine Trust and the Robbins Rights Trust since 1988 traveling worldwide to most major ballet companies. He is noted specifically for his contribution to Balanchine’s “black and white” ballets like Agon, The Four Temperaments, Episodes, and Symphony in Three Movements, and for Jerome Robbins’ ballets The Cage, Glass Pieces, Fancy Free, Dances at a Gathering, and The Concert. He has appeared often on public television in Dance in America, The Four Temperaments, Stravinsky Violin Concerto: Live From Lincoln Center, and PBS’s American Masters “Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About.” He is also featured in a documentary produced by the Checkerboard Foundation and Patsy Tarr, Bart Cook: Choreographer. Plus, he is featured in the 1993 film version of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker as the magical Herr Drosselmeir. 

Balanchine himself assigned Cook the role of being assistant ballet master to Robbins in 1980, a post he held until his departure in 1993. For the School of American Ballet (SAB), Balanchine urged Cook to begin to choreograph, and he produced several ballets for the SAB Educational Outreach programs and for the SAB annual workshop. These included, Seven by Five, Three Preludes (Saint-Saens),Three Preludes (Gershwin), La Italiana in Algeri (Rossini), and Rondo (Mozart). Many New York City Ballet (NYCB) alumni were in these ballets including Peter Boal, Jeff Edwards, Kelly Cass, and Wendy Whelan. In 1985 he restaged for the NYCB his Seven by Five Plus Two and, for the First American Musical Festival, Into The Hopper with music by William Bolcom (Orphée Sérénade). As an early example of a mixed medium ballet, Cook employed the artwork of Red Grooms. His Rocus Manhattan at the Guggenheim was filmed with the principal dancers in this art installation. Also used was Hopper’s painting “Nighthawks,” Picasso’s “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” Léger’s “The Three Musicians,” Rousseau’s “The Dream,” and Magritte’s “The Eye.” Other NYCB choreography includes Flotezart Mozart Flute Concerto for the Diamond Project in 1992.

In 2011 Cook received the Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, the University of Utah. He is vice president and co-founder of the Apollo Arts Initiative Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering an appreciation of the arts from their deeper holistic perspective.