Muriel Topaz, a former faculty member and former director of the School's Dance Division, died on April 28. She was 70 and lived in Connecticut.

Muriel Topaz in 1986. (Photo by Bernard Phillips)

A native of Philadelphia, Topaz studied dance at New York University and at Juilliard, where she graduated in 1954. She served as the rehearsal director for the Juilliard Dance Ensemble from 1959 to 1970 and succeeded Martha Hill as director of the Dance Division, a position she held from 1985 to 1992.

Though trained as a performer and choreographer, it was through her dedication to preserving choreography for future generations that Topaz had the greatest impact on the dance world. She championed the system of Labanotation, a method of writing down dances with complete detail and accuracy that was invented by Rudolf von Laban in the 1920s and first introduced in the U.S. in 1940. Topaz, long associated with the Dance Notation Bureau in New York, was director of Labanotation studies there from 1970 to 1978 and served as the bureau's executive director from 1978 to 1985, helping to expand and diversity its efforts to document and conserve choreographic works. She also organized and co-chaired two international notation congresses. She was responsible for placing the first full-time notator on the staff of a professional dance company (at the Paul Taylor Dance Company). While at Juilliard, Topaz restaged many notated dances for the Juilliard Dance Ensemble.

Read a tribute to Muriel Topaz by Laura Glenn, a former student and faculty member at Juilliard.

Topaz herself notated works by more than 25 choreographers, including George Balanchine, Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Kurt Jooss, José LimÃ3n, Jerome Robbins, Paul Taylor, and seven complete ballets by Antony Tudor. She wrote or edited 12 books, including Undimmed Lustre: The Life of Antony Tudor (published last year), Alvin Ailey: American Visionary, and The Genius of Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman. She also served on countless dance panels and boards, and was a senior editor at Dance Magazine. Topaz was married to composer Jacob Druckman, a Juilliard faculty member who died in 1996. She is survived by a son (Daniel Druckman, a current faculty member), a daughter, and three granddaughters.