This footage is from a 1970 TV Special “Ballet with Edward Villella” and shows he and Patricia McBride rehearsing Tschaikovksy Pas de Deux.
Edward Villella was always busy performing not just at NYCB, but in gigs around the country. For documentaries, educational seminars, guest appearances on TV variety shows, and more. He was an ambassador of dance, bringing it into the lives of millions of people. But his hectic schedule of “gigging” wasn’t just because he loved to educate:
Eddie told John Gruen in 1970: “People tend to think of dancers as super artistic individuals who are happy to dance for nothing at all. They are thought of as being beyond the mundane financial aspects of life. Dancing in the New York City Ballet won’t make you rich. We have a popular-priced ticket, and we have a popular-price salary. I always say that I dance OUTSIDE so that I can afford to dance INSIDE. In a way, I am subsidizing my own art.”
—The Private World of Ballet by John Gruen
"One of the most heartening aspects of the America dance scene is its generally high professional level. Who, for example, would imagine it possible to sit in a spacious junior high school auditorium here in White Plains and watch Patricia McBride and Edward Villella give as dazzling display of dancing as could be found anywhere? For a few moments while they were dancing last night, one knew with certainty that at that instant there could be no better dancing taking place anywhere else in the world, It is a curious feeling to have in White Plains.
"These two stars from the New York City Ballet were appearing as guest artists with the Eglevsky Ballet Company. They danced “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux." Miss McBride, with her fineboned delicacy and increasingly eloquent shadings of movement, has developed into a pride and joy of American dance.
"As for Mr. Villella, he is one of the world’s greatest male dancers, and he cannot dance an impeccable step without giving it the imprint of his character, that urchin, Latin Harlequin-style that sets him apart from his peers. There is, incidentally, only one definition of a great dancer, who has to dance not only with a fair selection of all the hooray adverbs ever applied to dancing but also in a way unique to himself. A great dancer dances for himself, and dances unmistakably. Mr. Villella is that extraordinatily rare thing, a great dancer."
—Clive Barnes, New York Times, 1967
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