The first time I saw Jimmy....

“Jimmy picked me up on the street outside a Martha Graham concert. He came up to me and asked if I was a dancer. After a dumbfounded moment, I said 'Yes', which was quite nervy as I'd  been studying for all of two or three months.  He then invited me to an 'audition'. I went, terrified of course, but I went. There was no audition. We started right in on a duet for me and David Ajootian.”                                                                 

Toby Armour on December 24, 2010

“I was 13 and a student at The School of American Ballet and Jimmy was there in a more advanced class than I. He spoke to me, I was too shy to answer- I just did what he said. He looked at my feet first and then he asked me to curve my back. No one had ever looked at my bare feet before and I did not know about curving the back... Jimmy asked me to dance with his company and I said, " Yes". That was the beginning, and Jimmy changed my life.”

Aileen Passloff on August 4, 2010

“It was at the School of American Ballet in October 1950. I had just come from London to take up a scholarship there, and was in C class, as was Jimmy. For a few days we were too shy to talk to each other, but then one day after class he said "Goodbye David" and disappeared into the elevator. We were best friends from then on."

David Vaughan on January 5, 2012 

“In the Spring of 1971, I was performing for Toby Armour at the Theater of Riverside Church in New York. I was to be mixed in with the audience after intermission, then rush onto stage at the beginning of a work called abalone company. I was told that ‘Jimmy’ was holding an aisle seat for me. After I sat down in the dark, a very erect gentleman with piercing eyes surveyed me up and down, “ Toby doesn’t know yet, but I am coming up to Boston in the Fall to make a dance for her company, and you will be in it.”

Michael Mao on December 24, 2010

JAMES WARING choreographed over one hundred dance works. They include short pieces as well as full-length ‘choreographies’, to use his own idiom, such as “Dances Before the Wall”, which received its premiere in 1957 at the Henry Street Playhouse. Mr. Waring is a renowned teacher, and spent part of 1973-74 as guest lecturer and choreographer at the University of Buffalo, New York. “The Rise and Fall of Modern Dance”, a book by Don McDonough, devoted a chapter to James Waring’s work.

The above biography appeared in a program copy for Toby Armour’s New England Dinosaur, Inc.

James Waring was Guest Director and Choreographer for that dance company from Summer of 1974 through Spring of 1975. During that time James Waring choreographed a new kind of love, l’artifices en l’air to Mozart’s d-minor String Quartet, K. 421, études to Sergei Lyapunov, and  re-set ARENA, originally made on Manhattan Festival Ballet. Waring had made dances for Toby Armour as well as for her dance company, including novelty sweets in 1971 to music by Scott Joplin, and purple moment in 1968, which subsequently went into the repertory of Netherlands Dans Theater. In the summer of 1975 James Waring choreographed a work to music by Schubert for the Eglevsky Ballet in residency on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. In the Fall of 1975 Waring died at age 58 in New York City. The cause was cancer.