Camille Rommett
Zena Rommett teaching at Steps studio in Manhattan in 2000.
Zena Rommett, a ballet dancer and teacher who developed Floor-Barre, an influential training method promoting bodily alignment for both dancers and nondancers, and whose students included Tommy Tune, Patrick Swayze and Judith Jamison, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 90.
The cause was cancer, said her daughter Camille Mouquinho Rommett.
Unlike traditional ballet barre exercises, which require students to stand upright holding a barre attached to a wall, Ms. Rommett’s Floor-Barre begins with students stretched on the floor and proceeds with gentle exercises to refine bodily placement, strengthen joints, increase vitality and help rehabilitate injuries without the pressure of gravity or the tendency toward rigidity that sometimes accompanies traditional standing-barre exercises. As she said in a 2008 interview in Dance magazine, “Many dancers don’t know how to stand correctly.”
Ms. Rommett attracted notable students from ballet, modern dance and musical theater, including Melissa Hayden and Lar Lubovitch. She and the teachers she trained also worked with skaters and other athletes, and in the Dance interview she recommended Floor-Barre for children, saying, “My technique gives children a strong foundation for unmannered dancing.”
Angelina Buttignol, known as Zena, was born on May 19, 1920, in Orsago, near Treviso, Italy, and came to America in 1925 with her mother. They settled in Elmsford, N.Y., to which her father, who eventually owned his own brick factory, had immigrated two years before.
Persuading her parents that she wanted to dance, she studied with leading teachers of the time, among them Anatole Vilzak, Ludmilla Schollar, Elisabeth Anderson-Ivantzova and Chester Hale, and made her Broadway debut in 1944 in “Seven Lively Arts,” a revue produced by Billy Rose with major ballet numbers choreographed by Anton Dolin, including the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Scènes de Ballet.”
She also danced on Broadway in “Song of Norway,” choreographed by George Balanchine, and “Paint Your Wagon,” choreographed by Agnes de Mille.
When her attention turned to pedagogy, she was noticed by Robert Joffrey, who in 1965 invited her to teach at his American Ballet Center. She opened her own school in 1968 and in recent years was associated with the Steps studio on Broadway, where she taught as recently as three months ago.
She was not the only teacher of the time to explore floor-based training: the Russian-born, Paris-based teacher Boris Kniaseff taught his “barre par terre,” a method primarily associated with ballet dancers, whereas Ms. Rommett remained interested in the widest application of Floor-Barre principles.
Although she was married to Alexis Nicoli Romanovich, an artist, who died in 1968, Joffrey gave her the professional name Rommett, a surname some other family members have kept.
In addition to her daughter Camille, of Manhattan, survivors include another daughter, Melissa Romanovich, of Manhattan; a sister, Lilias Buttignol Jones, of Scipio, N.Y.; two grandsons; and a great-granddaughter.
