Ушла из жизни основательница балетной студии Prince Ballet Энделесия Принс

Endelecia Prince didn’t start dancing ballet until she was an adult — but her flamenco background made her a quick learner. By year eight of lessons with dancer and choreographer Rex Bickmore, the two decided to open a studio in 1978 with the help of Prince’s husband, Bertrand Prince. Prince Ballet, Inc., located initially in a rented building on West San Francisco Street, was an instant hit. Advertisements in The New Mexican in 1979 listed five staff members and a slew of different classes, including pre-ballet and acrobatics. “We started with some ballet classes for children and continuing the beginning adult ballet classes,” said Gena Prince, Endelecia Prince’s daughter, who also danced — and later taught — at the school. “But suddenly these children, as they got older, they were staying with it with my mom. And the school just kept growing and growing.” Endelecia “Andy” Prince, who was named one of The New Mexican ‘s 10 Who Made a Difference in 1994, shaped dance education in Northern New Mexico for decades. She died July 6 in Houston after a battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 83. Prince was born Aug. 24, 1942, in Ranchitos, near Santa Cruz. Her early exposure to dance, according to an April 1979 edition of The New Mexican, was limited to Native folk dance; her grandfather played violin for community fiestas. “I loved those dances,” Prince told The New Mexican. “They are my earliest memories of dancing.” She started dancing flamenco at about age 11 under Santa Fe teacher Lily Baca, whom she continued dancing with until she was 19. During that time, Prince performed for the annual pre-Fiesta and Fiesta shows in Santa Fe, The New Mexican reported. She later took a break from dancing, got married and had two children. When Gena Prince was little, the mother-daughter pair both began taking ballet classes. “Raising the kids kept me busy, but there was a void in my life,” Endelecia Prince told The New Mexican. “I decided that I should start dancing just to stay in shape, so I signed up for ballet. I loved it.” Later, after Prince Ballet expanded, she started a nonprofit and joined Regional Dance America — a national organization of pre-professional dance companies. Gena Prince came on board as a dance teacher and choreographer, and the school took the children to a different dance festival every year. “She just had such a passion for the arts — for dance in particular, but music and literature and stuff,” Gena Prince said. “And she really loved children and she liked being a mentor to them.” She also served as a mentor for a group of 62 Santa Fe High School student athletes in 1980 after she volunteered to teach them dancing techniques. She felt ballet would benefit the football, basketball and volleyball players, enabling them to make fast, smooth changes in direction, she told The New Mexican. A wide range of people walked through the doors of Prince Ballet over the years. The school hosted many guest artists, including San Francisco jazz teacher Naomi Glixman, who decided she wanted to visit Santa Fe in 1982 and found Prince’s phone number in the Yellow Pages. “We talked for over an hour, and at the end of that time, she said, ‘I want to bring you out here to teach some master classes in Santa Fe at Prince Ballet,’ “ Glixman said. “... And I said, ‘Well, you’ve never seen me teach,’ and she said, ‘I just talked to you for over an hour — I know how you teach.’ And that was the beginning of a long history.” Glixman remembers her first trip to Santa Fe well. A blizzard delayed her flight and she didn’t arrive to Prince Ballet until 9 p.m., but 30 dancers still sat patiently on the floor, reading and patiently for the class. “It was a wonderful beginning,” said Glixman, who henceforth made the trek to New Mexico twice per year to guest-teach at Prince Ballet, developing a close friendship with Prince along the way. “She was a woman who showed who she was all the time,” Glixman added. “And who she was a generous, smart, funny, ethical, principled human being, who just really brought joy everywhere. She brought out the best in people; she never said it was good when it wasn’t, but she told you how to make it better.” Throughout the years, pages of The New Mexican were dotted with performance announcements: The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty and El Amor Brujo. Prince told the paper in 1989: “What I like to offer an audience is a place for people to forget about their everyday problems and allow themselves to be taken in by this rich fantasy land.” For Donna Maestas-De Vries, chief housing officer at Housing New Mexico and Prince’s niece, many fond childhood memories were made by attending Prince Ballet’s shows — and the corresponding cast parties, where she said she always met interesting people. Though she lived in California at the time, Maestas-De Vries said she always looked forward to visiting Santa Fe and staying at Prince’s house. “She was really open-minded, so you could talk to her about anything, like spirituality, or art — even politics,” Maestas-De Vries said. “I think just growing up, she was a really good influence on me kind of becoming more open-minded and open to more ideas.” Some proceeds from performance tickets went toward the studio’s scholarship fund — which paid for dance classes for children who could not otherwise afford them — or, one year, the Santa Fe Rape Crisis Center. When Prince noticed the school attracted a lot of children who drove from Española to attend weekend classes, she opened another school in that area. “It helped to expand the arts to Northern New Mexico,” Gena Prince said. Several of Endelecia Prince’s students who began dancing when they were children stuck with it for years. Prince mentioned three dancers who had been with her from toddlerhood through their teen years in her 10 Who Made a Difference profile, and she noted even those who didn’t go on to become professional ballerinas learned valuable skills from practicing dance. “Most ballet environments foster intense competition, self-criticism and strict conformity,” Jennifer Jimenez Sandoval, who attended Prince Ballet from age 3, wrote in an email. “Andy offered the exact opposite — a true sanctuary where every dancer possessed a distinct, brilliant sparkle and was encourage to shine uniquely and authentically.” Though Prince Ballet closed its doors around 2000, its legacy lives on in former students’ live. When Gena Prince invited attendees of her mother’s celebration of life last week to speak about her impact, she said many dancers stood up. “They talked about how the discipline and the love for ballet and the experiences helped them to become the women that they are today,” Prince said. “... It was just very impactful to hear all of those stories.” Prince went on to work in real estate, then at Wind River Trading Co., where she found a passion for Native American jewelry. Shortly after her cancer diagnosis, she moved to Texas to live with her children in 2025. “She was my mentor,” Gena Prince said. “And I learned so much from her, not just about dance, but about life.”