George Lee, a Chinese-born ballet dancer who was likely the first Asian to perform at New York City Ballet when he danced in George Balanchine’s original production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” in 1954, died on April 19 in Las Vegas. He was 90.
Jennifer Lin, who directed a short documentary about Mr. Lee called “Ten Times Better” (2024), confirmed his death, in a group home while under hospice care. He had no immediate survivors.
Mr. Lee, who immigrated to the United States in 1951, was studying at the School of American Ballet, City Ballet’s affiliated school, when Mr. Balanchine asked him to demonstrate his talent.
Mr. Lee, then known as George Li — he changed the spelling of his surname in 1959, when he was naturalized — had been trained by Russian teachers in Shanghai. He responded to Mr. Balanchine, who was raised in Russia, in the choreographer’s native language.
“He said, ‘What can you do good? Show me what you can do good,’ so I show him something,” Mr. Lee told The New York Times in 2024. “I did things like splits and double turns, down and up, turn again like a ball, and that’s it. He picked up some things and put them together.”
During a dress rehearsal, when a makeup artist covered him in yellowface, Mr. Balanchine intervened.
“He is Asian enough!” Mr. Lee recalled Mr. Balanchine saying. “Why do you make him more?”
The elements of Mr. Lee’s costume as the character Tea — the Fu Manchu mustache, queue ponytail and rice paddy hat that have routinely been used in the role — are now widely considered racist stereotypes, but Mr. Lee said he didn’t mind.
“Dancing is dancing,” he told The Times.
Mr. Lee appeared in Act II, when Marie and her prince visit the Land of Sweets. After being wheeled out in a box by two women, he performed and then returned to the box.
John Martin, in his review for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Lee “jumps wonderfully and exhibits some equally wonderful extensions in the Chinese dance.” In The Brooklyn Eagle, Paul Affelder praised his “almost unbelievable elevations in the dance of tea.”
Mr. Lee was not asked to join City Ballet; at 5-foot-5, he was told that he was too short. He graduated from the Manhattan School of Aviation Trades (now Aviation High School), in Queens, and then attended Indiana Technical College (now Indiana Tech), in Fort Wayne.
He toured occasionally with a ballet troupe run by the great Russian dancer Andre Eglevsky. But it wasn’t steady work, so he looked to Broadway.
In 1958, he auditioned for the original Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Flower Drum Song,” a story about Chinese assimilation in San Francisco. He danced the Bluebird pas de deux from “Sleeping Beauty,” performing it for Gene Kelly, the musical’s director.
After, Mr. Kelly told him: “George, I know you like to do ballet. Why don’t you learn something new?”
Mr. Lee said he went home to discuss the offer with his mother, Stanislawa Lee, a Polish-born former ballerina, who responded: “Maybe you should go ahead and try it. We’ve got to make a living.”
He stayed with the show through its run of 600 performances, and continued with it on tour. He would appear twice more on Broadway (in the musicals “Baker Street” and “Darling of the Day,” in the 1960s), but the rest of his career featured little ballet.
He found regular work in summer stock theater and danced in a cabaret show, “Carol Channing With Her 10 Stout-Hearted Men”; in a touring arena show, “Disney on Parade”; and in a Las Vegas revue, “Alcazar de Paris,” at the Desert Inn, his final act in show business.
“Whether he was in ballet or not, he used his ballet training,” Phil Chan, a choreographer and a founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, an initiative dedicated to ending offensive depictions of Asians in ballet, said in an interview. “If you look at clips of ‘Flower Drum Song,’ he’s doing great ballet technique.”
In his mid-40s, Mr. Lee pivoted to a new career — dealing blackjack in Las Vegas — and receded into dance history.
George Li was born on Feb. 18, 1935, in Hong Kong. His father, Alexander Li, was a circus acrobat who taught him how to do handstands; his mother was his first dance teacher. When Japan occupied Hong Kong in 1941, the family fled to Shanghai, and then his father went to western China to find work.
In Shanghai, a city with a vibrant population of émigrés, George took dance lessons from Russian teachers; at 7, he began performing polkas and Russian dances in nightclubs to help his mother get by. Sometimes he was paid in rice.
In 1945, George’s father died in a truck accident while trying to return to Shanghai. Four years later, George and his mother, fearing the Communist takeover of Shanghai, evacuated to the Philippines, where they spent two years in a refugee camp.
Before they left the Philippines, George’s mother warned him about what would be required if he wanted a future in dance. In an oral history interview for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in 2024, he recalled her saying, “Look here, George, you are Asian, part of you, and we’re going to America, and there will be all white people, so you better be 10 times better.”
Their immigration to the United States was sponsored by a friend of the family who also introduced George to the School of American Ballet.
When he later stopped dancing, his career was largely forgotten by the public. In 2022, Ms. Lin, the filmmaker, was looking at old photos at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, when she spotted a publicity shot of Mr. Lee from “The Nutcracker.”
Knowing how rare it was to see dancers of color perform at City Ballet, she wondered who this pioneering Asian was.
“I just became obsessed with finding George,” she said in an interview. “I started tracking him and found an obituary for his mother, which said that she was survived by a son, George, living in Las Vegas.”
Ms. Lin, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, called five George Lees in Las Vegas. When she finally located the former dancer, she said, Mr. Lee asked her, “Why are you looking for me? I’m nobody.”
It took about a year for her to complete “Ten Times Better,” which showed Mr. Lee at the Four Queens Hotel and Casino, where he dealt blackjack for 40 years, and at a reunion in Los Angeles of “Flower Drum Song” performers, including Patrick Adiarte, who died last month. (The half-hour documentary is available on PBS’s American Masters Shorts website.)
Graham Lustig, the artistic director of Oakland Ballet, said in an interview that he had been unaware of Mr. Lee’s dance career until he saw the documentary: “It’s like he was the ultimate undercover ballet dancer.”
On May 4, Oakland Ballet performed the world premiere of its “Angel Island Project,” seven dances by Asian American and Pacific Islander choreographers, set to music by Huang Ruo, about the harrowing experiences of Chinese detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay in the early 20th century.
The company dedicated the performance to Mr. Lee.
As Mr. Lustig said, “It seemed like the most fitting way to recognize George — an immigrant who pursued a dancing dream.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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