Viewed on film, dancing from more than 50 years ago tends to have a period quality, a certain quaintness. But films of the dancer and dance teacher Sandra Neels performing the revolutionary choreography of Merce Cunningham have not dated in the least.
Tall, slender, long-limbed, self-possessed, conveying an innocence bordering on unworldly, Ms. Neels appears onscreen as if she were filmed only yesterday, a lone figure commanding space with hands and feet that are exceptionally articulate.
She danced for Cunningham from 1963 to 1973, creating roles and solos that are still performed today. Later, she became a successful choreographer in her own right and a renowned teacher, and when she died recently at 85, she had been eminent in American dance for more than 60 years.
Her death was announced by Winthrop University, in Rock Hill, S.C., where she had been an associate professor of dance since 1990. The university specified no cause or place of death.
Sandra Neels was born on Sept. 21, 1939, in Las Vegas, and grew up in Portland, Ore. Her father, Frank F. Neels, was an electrician who also shone as a ballroom dancer. Her mother, Edith (Vallereux) Neels, known as Val, was a singer, an entertainer and a pianist at the Joan Mallory School of Dance in Portland, where Sandra and her sister, Sheryl, first studied tap and ballet.
Ms. Neels often spoke of the importance of her grounding in tap. She said that Cunningham, when teaching a new dance, tended to communicate with the vocal and physical rhythms used by many tap dancers.
After attending Portland State College (now Portland State University) for two years, and with a deepening commitment to modern dance, Ms. Neels furthered her dance studies in Seattle and Colorado before moving to New York in the early 1960s, with the aim of studying with Cunningham, whose teaching had been gaining wide renown.
On arriving in Manhattan, she found his studio closed; he and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which he founded in 1953, were on tour. So, on her own, she began exploring other aspects of the New York dance scene, not least the radically experimental dances of the Judson Dance Theater. She finally enrolled in classes taught by Cunningham, however, and found her true setting.
One of the many people she met in his classes was the California dancer Margaret Jenkins, who went on to become a leading choreographer in the Bay Area. Ms. Jenkins, in a recent email, recalled the Ms. Neels of 1963 as “kind, thoughtful and exact.”
“One just knew she would add a haunting quality to the work,” she wrote.
Cunningham asked Ms. Neels to join his company in the summer of 1963. By then, its loyal admirers included avant-garde artists like John Cage, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.
With donations from them and others, the Cunningham troupe embarked in 1964 on a world tour that reached from the United Kingdom and France to India and Japan. Along the way, the company drew more attention from leading European figures (the choreographer Frederick Ashton, the directors Lindsay Anderson and Peter Brook, and the ballerina Margot Fonteyn among them) than it had obtained in the United States. (The New York Times did not review the Cunningham company in its first 10 years of existence.)
Ms. Neels went on to create roles in a series of exceptional Cunningham world premieres, notably “Variations V,” from 1965, and “Walkaround Time” (1968). They and other premieres — including “Scramble” (1967), “RainForest” (1968) and “Second Hand” (1970) — have been danced again in the 21st century.
In many of those works, Ms. Neels was dancing in stage designs by artists who were becoming celebrated. “Scramble” had designs by Frank Stella; “RainForest,” by Andy Warhol; “Walkaround Time,” by Jasper Johns.
Among the qualities that Cunningham helped Ms. Neels develop was a capacity for slowness bordering on stillness. She was often matched to striking effect with the company’s first African American dancer, Gus Solomons Jr., who, like Ms. Neels, was tall, slender and leggy. (Mr. Solomons died in 2023.)
But by the early 1970s, Ms. Neels, by her account, felt that Cunningham was no longer attending closely to her work, and so she left the company in 1973. She would not return for three decades. In the intervening years, she danced in works by others, became an admired teacher and made more than 300 works of her own, staging them in Canada and across the United States. Some of her choreography was seen on television, in fashion shows and in musicals.
She was named an artist-in-residence at numerous universities; in addition to Winthrop, she taught at Harvard, CalArts, the University of North Carolina Greensboro and the University of South Florida.
The choreographer Rebecca Lazier, in an email, recalled Ms. Neels as “a remarkable life-changing presence” as a teacher at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in the 1980s.
Ms. Neels returned to the Cunningham company in 2003, working on revivals of pieces in which she had previously danced.
She was married three times. Her first husband, Jame Baird, was the Cunningham company’s stage manager. (Little is known of her second husband, who was Swiss.) Her third and longest-lasting marriage, beginning in 1986, was to the Canadian ballet dancer and choreographer Alain Charron, who died at 45 in 2002.
She is survived by her sister, Sheryl Neels Johnston.
Alastair Macaulay was the chief dance critic of The Times from 2007 until 2018.
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