In a 2008 interview with Dance Enthusiast, Ms. Panetta recalled that when students made mistakes, the strict Ms. Craske would throw them out of the classroom, a punishment Ms. Panetta received “all the time,” she said.
Those brief expulsions fueled her determination to improve, and she spent her timeouts diligently practicing in a dressing room. By age 14, she was such a strong technician that Ms. Craske hired her as a teaching assistant, planting the seed of her future career. “I realized,” Ms. Panetta said, “that teaching was an opportunity to learn.”
She immediately aspired to be a leading ballerina, however, and joined the corps of American Ballet Theater in 1968. But she soon found herself at odds with the company’s cofounding director, Lucia Chase, who placed Ms. Panetta on leave a year and a half into her contract, on the eve of a company tour.
“She just told me I was not pretty enough to be the representative of the United States in Russia,” Ms. Panetta recalled to the Times. “She reneged three weeks later, but I found some kind of inner pride and told her, ‘Nothing has changed with my face, so I’m not going to come back.’”
After a few years performing freelance with small ballet companies, she found a home in modern dance. “What was so nice about coming downtown,” she said, “was that they liked you for your personality, not in spite of it.”
She married Mr. Roth, a businessman, in 1975. In addition to him, her survivors include their son, Niles, and a grandson.