Students recall dance teacher Sylvia Hamer

Sylvia J. Hamer, a knowledgeable and dedicated instructor of dance who was known as Ann Arbor’s “First Lady of Ballet,” died Saturday at the Chelsea Retirement Community. She was 93.

“She was a dedicated, accomplished teacher,” says Susan Nisbett, a dance critic for The Ann Arbor News. “Thousands of Ann Arbor girls went through her school, and many of them went on to become teachers themselves.”

Nisbett says Hamer was a disciplinarian who held her students to strict standards.

“That’s vital in the arts and if you’re going to turn out well-trained, properly drilled dancers,” Nisbett says. “There’s no quick fix in becoming a professional dancer. Sylvia Hamer knew that from personal experience. And she wanted her students to know that.”

Pamela Rutledge, now a grandmother and a teacher of ballet, remembers starting dance instruction from Hamer at age 7.

“I’d say I owe what I’m doing today to Sylvia,” Rutledge says. “She was dedicated to the dance… Certainly she was a master teacher who devoted her life to the art.”

Lee Ann King now operates the Sylvia Studio of Dance, which her grandmother founded in 1932 in the old Weurth Theater building. She remembers Hamer as a strong advocate of method and style in teaching ballet.

“She remained a student of ballet all her life, and she incorporated what she learned from the masters into her teaching,” King says.

“I think the most valuable lesson she gave her students was that the discipline, the hard work learned in ballet can be used in every other art form, that if you can master the skill of ballet it can be applied to other fields.”

The list of Hamer’s accomplishments and honors in the field of dance instruction fills pages. A native of the village of Peck near Port Huron, she became a student of dance in her early teens, moving to New York as a young woman to study at the New York School of Ballet and the Albertina Rascheare Studios. She was a member of a dance company that appeared frequently in New York productions.

Returning to Michigan in the late 1920s, she was dancing professionally in the Bay City area when she met and married Ellsworth G. Hamer, a theater manager. They moved to Ann Arbor when he took a job with the Butterfield Theaters here. The move was a fortunate career turn for Sylvia, who immediately enrolled as a student of ballet and Spanish dancing under Theodore Smith of Detroit, one of the outstanding teachers in the Midwest.

After founding Sylvia Studio of Dance, she introduced the Ann Arbor area to the Cecchetti method of dance, bringing to Ann Arbor from London a world-renowned teacher, Katherine Schroeder Forbes, to set up tis system of planned development of students.

Hamer founded the Ann Arbor Civic Ballet in 1954.

An inveterate traveler, by the age of 85 she had been to London 19 times to study dance.

“I don’t go there just to take classes,” she remarked once. “I go to study!”

She taught dancing across the country and around the world and was in her 80s when she served a stint as an instructor at Mills College in San Francisco and instructed in both China and Japan, working with ballet companies in Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Survivors include a son, Jay B. King of Manchester; a step-son, Austin Hamer of Washington; three grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be at 5 p.m. Friday at the First United Methodist Church. Memorial donations may be made to the Sylvia Hamer Scholarship Fund, the Ann Arbor Civic Ballet or the First United Methodist Church.