She taught the joy of ballet

CARY -- Back when a streetcar traced the length of Glenwood Avenue, a young girl who lived on that thoroughfare would crank up her record player and pirouette in front of the window each time she heard it coming. Maybe, Betty Kovach hoped, a talent scout riding the trolley might discover her.

No one ever did, but that didn't turn Kovach off from dance. She persevered, taking classes in Raleigh and furthering her training in New York before opening a local studio to train future ballerinas.

When she closed the studio several years ago, she spent more time in her Cary dance shop, outfitting dancers in tights and pointe shoes.

Recently, she drove herself directly from her South Hills storefront to emergency care for treatment of what she assumed was a bad cold. Instead, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

Betty Emanuel Kovach died last month. She was 88 and attended her last dance performance, Artistic Expressions by the Carolina Ballet, days before her death.

Born in Raleigh in 1920, Kovach became interested in dance as a girl. She liked to say she was inspired by a picture she found of her mother outfitted in some sort of dance costume.

She began dancing at Louise Williams Dance School on Hillsborough Street and harbored dreams of jetes and plies in big-time venues with big-time companies. She did end up traveling to New York to take classes at the American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet School, and there was no denying she had talent. But not quite enough to make it as a professional ballerina. Friends said she had started her professional training too late.

Instead, she took up teaching. Later in life, she was grateful that her dance card had played out as it did. Ballerinas on the stage are a transient lot, not lasting long. Teaching, however, could be a lifelong pursuit.

For Kovach, it lasted more than 50 years.

When she returned from New York, she began working at a studio in Raleigh.

It was there that she met her former husband, Jon Kovach, a dancer who was recuperating from an injury he'd suffered in a New York production of "Guys and Dolls."

By 1956, they were married and had opened the Emanuel-Kovach Dance School off Glenwood Avenue. It grew to become one of the area's largest schools, later moving to Oakwood and eventually to Cary.

Ballet ... her way

For 50 years, she taught ballet her way.

Daganova-trained, Kovach embraced the slow, deliberate Russian method. She thoroughly covered the basics and their techniques before moving to the next step.

She had definite opinions about proper training. Chief among those was her disdain for competitions; she didn't think that's what dance was about.

"Dance was not a trophy," said Betsey Fowler, who took lessons from Kovach. "It did not matter if you were fat, if you had no talent whatsoever, you felt like you were a dancer when you were there."

Because she loved dance, she wanted others to feel the same. Children from well-to-do families could afford lessons, but poorer children could not. But if dance were taught in the public schools, well, then, that would level the balletic playing field.

After years of pushing her agenda, Kovach became the first dance teacher at Enloe High School, helping shape its dance program.

She would take some of her dancers with her into the schools. There, at a portable barre set up in a school auditorium, sometimes in a classroom, they'd demonstrate the fundamentals of dance.

"She thought dance was the ultimate art form," said her brother, Robert Emanuel, a lawyer.

Her reputation was such that when she called up the New York City Ballet and said, "Come take a look at this kid," they came. The kid was her student, Patsy Collins, who ended up getting a scholarship to study with the ballet in New York.