Susan Pace - White

Susan Pace White, the matriarch of classical ballet in Northeast Tennessee, passed on Thursday, January 12, 2017. She taught ballet for more than 40 years in Johnson City and led the City Youth Ballet as its artistic director for 27 years. She was 68 years old. Best known for her unending creativity on stage and her demand for excellence in ballet class, Susan inspired generations of ballet dancers. Every year, she created ?The Nutcracker' for sold-out audiences. Additional ballets she staged and choreographed for local audiences included ?Dracula,' ?Alice in Wonderland,' and ?Christmas Carol.' For her youngest audiences, she brought children?s ballets such as ?Carnival of Animals' and ?Peter and the Wolf.' She even had her dancers take ballet to the masses by having them perform at local festivals and alongside the Johnson City Symphony. She took ballet to Johnson City?s low-income children hosting free ballet classes at area youth centers. She taught at Girls Inc., Carver Recreation Center, among others. From those classes, she found new talent, brought those children to her studios for scholarship classes, later sending them to professional work in the dance world. ?My wish would be that all children take ballet,' she once said about her work. Susan inherited her life work from her mother, Wilma Holloway Pace, and aunt, Reese Holloway, who founded the Holloway Dancing School in 1928. They took ballet instruction to new heights by bringing to Johnson City nationally known ballet luminaries to train their local dancers. In fact, Susan was invited at age 8 to train in New York City. At age 19, she danced professionally with the Miami Junior Civic Ballet. She also trained with the American Ballet Theater and the National Ballet of Canada. But Susan?s most distinguished work was training dancers. At advanced levels, her dancers trained six days a week. She developed dancers from as young as 3 through their high school years. Many continued in college; several danced professionally. Susan received the Tennessee Governor?s School Outstanding Teacher of the Year award for 2003 and was named as a Tri-Cities Local Hero. She built her dancers with the basics and challenged them to take on the top roles in her ballets. All the while, she built a sense of family and a camaraderie among her dancers as the older ones were expected to be role models to younger dancers. Her legacy will always be excellence and a fierce love for her ballet family. She is preceded in death by her parents, Wilma Holloway Pace and Edwin ?Sid' Lofton Pace, and her beloved husband, James Russell White, who passed in 2012. She is survived by her daughter, Cassandra Lei White; son, Sean Holloway Foster and his wife, Kristina; and the light of her life, her granddaughter, Rylei Pace Foster. A celebration of her life will be held Saturday, January 21, at Morris-Baker Funeral Home, 2001 E. Oakland Ave., Johnson City, Tennessee, with visitation from 1-3 pm and eulogy at 3 pm.