Nancee Cortés

A Wonderful Life: Onetime ballerina calls Santa Fe home Nancee Cortes firmly believes the adage "staying together for the sake of the children" is not necessarily the best route to family happiness. "My parents were just about to split up when my mother discovered she was pregnant, so they stayed together," she said. "I just wish they had divorced before I was born because the next 15 years of my life were awful. It was so painful to endure their constant arguments." Cortes managed to cope with the situation by losing herself in the world of ballet. Born in Denver in 1935 and the only child of Doris Murray and Charles Heimbecher, Cortes said, "As far back as I can remember I was dancing around the house. I didn't need an audience, I just loved to move. Many dancers I've met over the years came from troubled backgrounds like mine. I believe that dancing is a way of ridding oneself of turmoil." During World War II, when Cortes was 9, her father found a job in Seattle working at the shipyards. That's when she met Robert Joffrey in a ballet class. "Robert was around 16 at the time. He had a distinctive personality, was extremely intelligent and a fabulous dancer. As I watched him in class, I thought to myself, he's going to be famous," she said. In 1953, she graduated sixth in a class of 600 from Denver's South High School, headed to New York, and looked up her friend Joffrey, who, by1 then, was teaching ballet. She took classes with him and at other studios with dancers such as Rudolph Nureyev, Dame Margot Fontaine and Eric Bruhn, to name a few. "As a professional dancer, you're never through taking classes. You have to work every day. Cortes lived at the Ferguson Residence for Girls on East 68th St., where Shirley Maclaine also lived. "We used to go out and get ice cream in our pajamas. Shirley would come to class wearing long, dangling earrings and she was always late, so she got kicked out of our ballet group — she was full of the dickens!" In addition to the daily grind of ballet classes, Cortes auditioned for as many companies as possible. Her first paying job as a dancer was a six-week gig at a nightclub on Long Island, where she portrayed a French ingénue. Cortes' career took a sudden change in course when Robert Joffrey, who was about to leave for Denmark, asked her to take over his company while he was away. "At the time I was so mad at him. He basically threw the company in my hands, and I was totally unprepared," she said. Although Cortes was unsure of how she would handle the new role that was thrust upon her, Joffrey had complete confidence in her abilities as a choreographer. In his absence, Cortes blossomed in her new role, which led to many other jobs choreographing for Radio City Music Hall, the Connecticut Dance Academy, the Performing Arts Department at the University of Southern California and the University of Utah, where she became chair of the Department of Ballet. While at the University of Utah, she raised several million dollars for the completion of a new performing-arts complex. Cortes also was an executive in Los Angeles and worked closely with the composer Igor Stravinsky and the violinist, Jascha Heifetz. As she made a name for herself in the performing arts, she married, divorced and then remarried her childhood sweetheart, Romiro Cortes, a classical composer. "He was a genius and the love of my life. When I was in junior high, my choral teacher invited him to our class, where he performed the works of Chopin on the piano. He was just 14 at the time, and his rendition of the music was just magical," she said. Cortes first came to Santa Fe when she was 5 and moved here to stay in 1993. That first trip as a youngster made an impression. My father was a roofing contractor, and one of his clients invited him to the Santa Fe Fiesta," she said. "I felt an immediate connection to the dances of the Native Americans, and to the Spanish music played at the Fiesta. Even back then, I knew there was a place for me here." https://www.santafenewmexican.com/life/travel/a-wonderful-life-onetime-ballerina-calls-santa-fe-home/article_d985656a-0b4c-5546-a120-cd1c9d3283b7.html