Linda Tarnay, Dancer and Teacher of Generations, Dies at 75

Linda Tarnay, a distinguished dancer, choreographer and teacher with a flair for the whimsical, died Nov. 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 75.

She had Parkinson’s disease and leukemia, her sister, Mary Tolbert Matheny, said in confirming the death.

Tarnay guided generations of students during a 38-year career at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she taught technique and composition and was dance department chairwoman for four years.

By the time she began her Tisch career in 1972, she had been performing in modern dance works on New York stages for almost a decade. At 6 feet tall she was a striking presence and had a certain audaciousness about her. An outdoor performance in May 1971 was representative.

“An attractive blond reincarnation of Isadora Duncan, in pink tunic and bare legs, loped gracefully around a sapling on the Chase Manhattan Plaza at lunchtime yesterday to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth,” The New York Times wrote, describing her in a spectacle that surprised the noon Wall Street crowd. The show, which featured 40 members of James Cunningham/The Acme Dancers, was part of a series that sought to showcase dance in settings other than a traditional stage.

Tarnay was still dancing 42 years later, five years after her Parkinson’s had been diagnosed. In 2013 she provided the story for, and danced a seated solo in, “The Dress,” a tale of love and loss choreographed by Naomi Goldberg Haas and performed at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.

Linda Page Tolbert was born on March 29, 1943, in Harlingen, Texas, and grew up primarily in Annapolis, Maryland. Her father, James, taught at St. John’s College there, and her mother, Jane Pink Tolbert, was a social worker.

Linda began dancing as a child, at first hoping to be a ballerina. She studied with Estelle Dennis, a noted Baltimore dance teacher. Matheny said that when her sister was 14, Dennis took her to New York to dance for George Balanchine, who told her that she was too tall to be a ballerina and suggested modern dance as an alternative.

“She would later say that Balanchine’s redirecting her focus from ballet to modern dance had been the luckiest disappointment of her life,” her sister wrote in a prepared obituary.

Tarnay spent two summers studying with Martha Graham in New York while still in high school, and after she graduated from Bennington College in Vermont in 1964 with a degree in dance she settled in the city. She later received a master’s degree at NYU.

Tarnay was among the group of dancers and choreographers who helped Jack Moore, Jeff Duncan and Art Bauman bring the Dance Theater Workshop collective into being in 1965. She performed in works by renowned choreographer Anna Sokolow and others and also had her own company, Linda Tarnay & Dancers.

In 1969 she married Matthias Tarnay, whom she had met at Bennington, and though the marriage ended the next year, she kept the name Tarnay for the rest of her career.

Her own choreography included works like “Birdwatch,” a solo “whose miming of bird postures suggested states of human emotions,” as a Times review in 1972 put it, and “Anemone,” in which “five women in sculpturally draping gowns slithered coolly through unfolding circles, like a single giant, Arctic blossom,” in the words of a 1979 Times review.

Tarnay also taught at the American Dance Festival for 16 summers and was frequently an artist in residence at The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard.

In addition to her sister, survivors include a niece and a nephew.

Tarnay also enjoyed singing, including in the choir at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery.

“Linda had a clear soprano voice,” choreographer Kathryn Posin, a friend since their Bennington College days, said by email, “and we would gather around her as she held her guitar and her long blond hair fell over her shoulder and sing, ‘Shall we go, lassie, go and we’ll go together,/Where wild mountain thyme grows around the blooming heather.'”