David Howard

David Howard (born David Charles Edwards) (14 June 1937 – 11 August 2013) was an English ballet dancer and teacher, who taught internationally at institutions such as the Royal Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and the National Ballet of Canada. Howard opened his popular eponymous dance studio in New York City, the David Howard School of Ballet (later the David Howard Dance Center) in 1977, before its closure in 1995.

His teaching style was described by The New York Times as "...a kinaesthetic approach, in which dancers were taught to rely less on external feedback from the mirror and more on the minute internal signals that telegraph the position of the head, limbs and torso in space". Howard said of dance that "Out of the feeling comes the form...Ninety percent of the time students are taught the form first. And then they're expected, through some act of God, to get the feeling." Howard's pupils included Gelsey Kirkland, Patricia McBride and Mikhail Baryshnikov. McBride paid tribute to Howard describing him as "...one of the great teachers of our day, for many, many years," and Baryshnikov said of Howard that "He was a kind of father figure for people like me and like Gelsey."