George Balanchine (1904-1983)

Transcription

George Balanchine (1904-1983)
by Damien Jack
American ballet has had many inventors,
not least among them Catherine Littlefield,
the Christensen Brothers, Eugene Loring,
Jerome Robbins, and Agnes de Mille. Yet
one name stands at the apex of ballet in the
United States as both prime mover and
most prolific and innovative creator.
George Balanchine.
Heir to the great ballet masters of the
past—Noverre, Bournonville, and Petipa—
George Balanchine is generally considered
the most important ballet choreographer of
the 20th century. Through his founding of
The School of American Ballet with Lincoln
Kirstein in 1934 and of the companies that
led to the creation of New York City Ballet
in 1948, Balanchine created an American
school and style of ballet that was the equal
of those of France, Denmark, and Russia.
It was a new American classicism, largely
stripped of the “parade and pantomime” of
nineteenth-century ballet and marked by
Balanchine’s love of American popular
culture—of African-American dance,
Westerns, Broadway showgirls, and Fred
Astaire —with a style characterized by
speed, spaciousness, clarity of execution,
musicality, and the rhythms of modern
American life (Kirstein 141).
Balanchine created over 200 ballets, and
choreography for Broadway, vaudeville, and
opera stages as well as for film and
television—425 works in total. His ballets
cover an astonishing range, including
narratives (most famously the version of
The Nutcracker he created in 1954), shorter
poetic or mood pieces (Serenade, 1935; La
Valse, 1951), large-scale stage spectacles
(Western Symphony, 1954; Stars and
Stripes, 1958; Union Jack, 1976), and
bravura renditions of Petipa-style classicism
(Symphony in C, 1947; Theme and
Variations, 1947/1960). He remains best
Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
known for the series of bold modernist
masterpieces he produced primarily during
his years at New York City Ballet: Four
Temperaments, 1946; Agon, 1957; Episodes,
1959; Movements for Piano and Orchestra,
1963; Stravinsky Violin Concerto 1972; and
Kammermusik No 2, 1978. These plotless
dances, usually performed in black and
white practice clothes against a simple
colored cyclorama, are powerful
distillations of Balanchine’s idea that
“movement in choreography is an end in
itself: its only purpose is to create the
impression of intensity and beauty”
(Balanchine 782).
Balanchine’s deep and rare understanding
of music allowed him to create dense,
complex formal explorations of each ballet’s
score. He possessed a genius for producing
bold dance movement of a seemingly
endless richness and variety; yet such was
Balanchine’s grounding, his deep
understanding of Maryinsky classicism, that
his most extreme inventions never seem
merely freakish or odd. Every step feels as
inevitable as the notes in a Mozart
symphony. As historian and critic Jennifer
Homans puts it, “Balanchine’s most classical
dances have a radical edge, and his most
revolutionary dances were always rooted in
classical forms” (526). Rather than simply
breaking or shattering the classical style,
Balanchine both enlarged and refreshed its
language, giving it new and protean form.
Beginnings: 1904-1921
George Balanchine was born in St.
Petersburg, Russia on January 22, 1904.
Christened Georgi Melitionovich
Balanchivadze (Serge Diaghilev twenty
years later Gallicized the name), he was the
second of three children born to Meliton
Balanchivadze, a prominent Georgian
composer, and Maria Nikolayevena
Vassilyeva, who had a deep love of music
and dance. All three children became
1
artists. “We were naturally a musical
family,” Balanchine later said. “My brother
played the piano, my sister the violin, and
from the time I was five years old, I too
studied the piano” (746).
In August of 1914, Balanchine was enrolled
in the Imperial Ballet School in St.
Petersburg. At first he was extremely
unhappy there. The discipline was strict,
and the other students sometimes cruel. As
he later remembered it, “I was certain I had
no aptitude for dancing and was wasting my
time and the Tsar’s money” (746). During
his second year at the school his attitude
underwent a sudden change:
My first time on stage was in a
Tchaikovsky ballet. It was in
Sleeping Beauty. I was still a small
boy then. I was a cupid, a tiny
cupid. It was Petipa’s choreography.
I sat down on a golden cage. And
suddenly everything opened! A
crowd of people, an elegant
audience. And the Maryinsky
Theater all light blue and gold! And
suddenly the orchestra started
playing. I sat on the cage in
indescribable ecstasy enjoying it
all—the music, the theater, and the
fact that I was onstage. Thanks to
Sleeping Beauty I fell in love with
ballet (Volkov 31).
The music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (18401893) and the choreography of Marius
Petipa (1818-1910) became lifelong
touchstones for Balanchine. What had
previously been meaningless classroom
exercises suddenly sprang to life when they
were connected with the highly charged
world of the theater. After the Sleeping
Beauty performance Balanchine threw
himself into his studies. Years later the
great ballerina Felia Doubrovska (18961981) remembered spotting the “little boy
who doesn’t miss a thing” watching her and
the other company members with eagle
eyes as they rehearsed. Balanchine’s great
gifts as dancer and choreographer soon
became apparent. By 1920 the sixteenyear-old had created, for a school
performance, his first recorded piece of
choreography, a short pas de deux called La
Nuit. Even at this early age, Balanchine, who
was to become the master of the pas de
deux, played with the conventional form of
the duet and experimented with new
formulations and extensions of old steps.
The fact that La Nuit continued to be
performed in Russia long after Balanchine’s
departure for the West—Mikhail
Baryshnikov recalled seeing the piece
performed during his student days—gives
us some sense of how distinctive
Balanchine’s gifts were even at the very
start of his career as a dance maker.
Just as the artistic and social life of St.
Petersburg left permanent marks on
Balanchine and his art, so did the explosive
politics. The years following the Russian
Revolution were chaotic, and living
conditions harsh. Food was scarce,
sometimes impossible to find, and in the
winter months fuel for heating was in short
supply. When the Bolsheviks closed the
school and theater for a brief period,
Balanchine went to work as a messenger
and as an apprentice to a saddle maker. For
a time he accompanied silent films as a
pianist—for which he was paid with scraps
of food. Starvation undermined
Balanchine’s health, leading to his later
battle with tuberculosis. The increasing
political oppression, censorship, and the
Soviets’ gradual turn away from support for
experimentation in the arts and toward
Socialist realism eventually pushed him to
flee the country.
A Musical Education
In 1921 Balanchine graduated with honors
and was accepted into the corps de ballet of
the former Maryinsky, which now went by
the rather more proletarian, postrevolutionary name of the State Academic
2
Theater of Opera and Ballet. He soon made
a name for himself as a character dancer
possessed of speed, bravura style, and
strong acting skills, and was especially
admired for his performance of the Candy
Cane variation in The Nutcracker. At some
point between 1919 and 1921, he enrolled
as a student at the Petrograd Conservatory
of Music, where he studied music theory
and continued his piano studies. He also
began to compose music. Balanchine’s
musical education, which his biographer
Bernard Taper has said was “such as no
choreographer before has ever had,” would
become the envy of his peers (51). It
enabled him to make dances that were
complex explorations, illustrations, and
commentaries on his chosen musical scores;
and it made a vast world of sophisticated
concert music available to him. Before
beginning work on a dance he often
produced a piano reduction of the score he
was choreographing. He was able to
internalize the structure of a musical
composition in a way most other
choreographers simply could not.
As dance historian Nancy Reynolds has
stressed, Balanchine’s understanding of
musical structure allowed him to explore a
musical score choreographically with great
freedom, rather than simply or only
following what Stravinsky called the
“tyranny of the beat.” Balanchine was able
to choreograph “across the bar line, or in
counterpoint with the music, or in musical
rests, observing inner voices, hidden
rhythms, silent downbeats, and pitch
contours, to all of which he applied varying
accents” (528-529). He was able, as well, to
collaborate closely with the living
composers he worked with, most famously
Igor Stravinsky. In later years he would
occasionally step into the pit and conduct
the orchestra during performances of his
work.
The Russian Avant-Garde and the Young
Ballet: 1921-1924
In the early 1920s, Balanchine, still in his
teens, became deeply involved in the avantgarde artistic world that briefly blossomed
in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Two
experimental choreographers, Fedor
Lopukhov (1886-1973) and Kasyan
Goleizovsky (1892-1970), had a major
impact on his development. Balanchine was
especially influenced by Lopukhov’s
attempts to break away from narrative
dance and place music at the heart of
balletic construction, as well as by his use of
acrobatic and athletic movement. The
influences Balanchine came under during
this period remained visible throughout his
career in the West—in his focus on music
and pure dance in ballet construction, in the
parallel feet of Apollo (1928), in the
complex intertwining of the Agon pas de
deux, in the acrobatic contortions seen in
Stravinsky Violin Concerto, to name only a
few examples. United with Maryinsky
classicism this avant-garde spirit of
experimentation was the foundation on
which Balanchine would later build his
American ballet.
Goleizovsky’s Constructivist experiments in
extending the classical vocabulary and the
example he set as the head of his “avantgarde” dance group inspired Balanchine to
found the Young Ballet, in 1922. Made up
primarily of Balanchine’s youthful
colleagues at the State Ballet, the chamber
company performed in cafés, parks, and in
the hall of the old State Duma (or
parliament) building. Soon the dances
Balanchine made for the Young Ballet
began drawing appreciative—and sizeable
—audiences of actors, artists, intellectuals,
and workers. Balanchine and his Young
Ballet became the talk of the town.
The more open-minded critics praised
Balanchine’s work, but conservative critics
railed against it. By 1923 the postrevolutionary artistic renaissance began to
3
meet political resistance. The officials in
charge of the former Maryinsky threatened
to fire any dancers taking part in
Balanchine’s Youth Ballet, and Balanchine
was expelled from the theater.
As the political situation grew more
oppressive, Balanchine and a few close
friends considered other options. “We
dreamed of going away,” Balanchine later
said, “anywhere, as long as we got away”
(Volkov 98). In 1924 Balanchine left for
Europe with a carefully, cautiously
organized group called the Soviet State
Dancers, their ostensible plan to tour
German cities during the summer and
return to the Soviet Union in the fall. While
in Germany, Balanchine and three other
dancers—Tamara Geva (Balanchine’s first
wife), Alexandra Danilova, and Nicholas
Efimov—despite receiving a telegram
officially ordering them home, made the
fateful decision not to return to the Soviet
Union.
From there they traveled to England and an
unsuccessful, rag-tag engagement at the
Empire Theater, a glamorized vaudeville
house in London. Broke and feeling
desperate, Balanchine and his comrades
made their way to Paris, where the four
gifted Russian émigré dancers soon
attracted the notice of Serge Diaghilev
(1872-1929). An audition was arranged at
the home of Diaghilev’s patron and close
friend Misia Sert, and all four dancers were
asked to join the Ballets Russes.
At the age of twenty, Balanchine was on his
way to becoming ballet master of the most
famous ballet company in the world.
The Diaghilev Years: 1924-1929
Diaghilev introduced Balanchine to the
greatest artists, musicians, and dancers
working in Europe, educated him in matters
of taste, challenged him, and granted him
the freedom and scope to develop as a
choreographer. As Balanchine later put it,
“the Diaghilev company [was where] I
learned to recognize what was great and
valid in art, where I acquired the ability and
strength to analyze a work of art on its true
merits and where, finally, I learned to be on
my own, to do what my artistic sense
prompted me to do—in short, to be an
artist” (753). Years later, in America,
Balanchine attempted to give the same
education in taste and living to his dancers
and choreographers. “He taught you how to
live” the New York City Ballet dancer
Lourdes Lopez recalled (Garafola 37).
Balanchine created opera-ballets for the
Ballets Russes winter season in Monte
Carlo, rehearsed the dancers, refurbished
the old warhorses in the repertoire, and
created new ballets for the company. He
made a total of ten ballets during his time
with the Ballets Russes, beginning with Le
Chant du Rossignol (1925), which marked
the start of his extraordinary lifelong
association with Igor Stravinsky (18821971). Balanchine would produce a total of
thirty-nine works set to Stravinsky scores.
Their collaboration really began with
Apollon Musagète (1928), now known
generally in the English speaking world as
Apollo. In Balanchine’s words, of the ballets
he made for Diaghilev, Apollo is
. . . the most important of these,
certainly the most important for me
personally for I regard this ballet as
the crucial turning point of my
artistic life. . . . Stravinsky’s score
for Apollo taught me that a ballet,
like his music, must have restraint
and discipline. Stravinsky’s music
had a wonderful clarity of tone, and
I saw that gestures, the basic
material of the choreographer,
have family relations, like different
shades in painting and different
tones in music. Some are
incompatible with others: one must
work within a given frame,
consciously, and not dissipate the
4
effect of a ballet with inspirations
foreign to the tone or mood one
understands it must possess. Apollo
depicted Stravinsky’s music visibly
(753-754).
More than eight decades after its premiere,
Apollo still feels fresh from start to finish,
like something newborn or just
discovered—highly appropriate to a ballet
that is in part about the birth and education
of a god. Apollo is often referred to as
Balanchine’s first neo-classical ballet,
marking the moment when he turned away
from a more Romantic style and toward the
classicism of Petipa. The ballet has the
grandeur of Maryinsky classicism; but it is a
modern classicism, human-scaled and
stripped of pomposity and fustian.
Balanchine seamlessly combines such
contemporary innovations as Charleston
steps, flat feet, acrobatics, turned-in legs,
and jazzy elements drawn from black dance
(particularly the thrust forward pelvis that
would become a Balanchine trademark)
with pure Petipa classicism. Balanchine
even made use of positions from
Goleizovsky’s avant-garde Soviet dances—a
mix of styles that, in hands other than
Balanchine’s, might feel odd and anything
but classical. Instead, Balanchine’s Apollo
creates the sense of an ancient ritual
unfolding outside of time. Every step and
gesture feels inevitable, in large part
because every movement is organically
integrated with Stravinsky’s musical
structure.
Apollo is Balanchine’s earliest ballet to
survive from the Diaghilev period, although
he made many changes in the work over
the years. The other surviving ballet from
this period is Prodigal Son (1929).
Set to a score by Sergei Prokofiev (18911953) with décor by Georges Rouault (18711958), Prodigal Son takes its story from the
biblical parable. Whereas in Apollo dance
dominates story, in Prodigal Son the
narrative is as important as the dancing.
Everything about Prodigal Son makes a bold
contrast with Apollo. In place of Apollo’s
tender, chaste lyricism, Prodigal Son is
expressionistic, hot, and emotional. In it,
Balanchine combines classical steps with
acrobatics, mime, and poses derived from
Byzantine icons. While Apollo is cool and
calm, Prodigal contains moments of savage
intensity and over-the-top theatricality. The
ballet is especially remembered for its
sexually charged pas de deux between the
Prodigal and the dangerously seductive
Siren.
With these two ballets, both masterpieces,
Balanchine, at twenty-five, entered a new
phase in his creative life. He had a growing
reputation as a choreographer and his
position as Diaghilev’s ballet master was
secure. Then, on August 19, 1929, Diaghilev
died in Venice, and his company died with
him. Balanchine later described it as the
“end [of] the most important and
entertaining twenty years of creativity in
music and painting and dancing that Europe
had seen since the Renaissance”
(Balanchine 754).
The Wandering Years: 1929-1933
The members of Diaghilev’s company were
dispersed, and Balanchine spent the next
years as an itinerant choreographer
crisscrossing Europe in search of work. He
moved between the world of popular
entertainment and the more rarefied world
of the ballet, setting a pattern that would
continue after his move to the United
States when he worked on Broadway and in
Hollywood. In the years after Diaghilev’s
death he produced choreography for
Charles B. Cochran’s musical shows in
London’s West End in 1930 and 1931. Again
in London, with a company billed as “16
Delightful Balanchine Girls 16,” he created
dances for Sir Oswald Stoll’s Variety Shows.
There were brief stints as guest Ballet
Master at the Royal Danish Ballet and a
promising job creating a new ballet at the
5
Paris Opera, cut short when Balanchine fell
ill with tuberculosis. Balanchine’s health
remained precarious for many years, but he
was well enough in 1932 to join Blum and
de Basil’s Les Ballets Russes de Monte
Carlo.
Balanchine brought with him to Monte
Carlo three remarkable young dancers he
had discovered in Paris: Irina Baronova
(aged 13), Tamara Toumanova (aged 14),
and Tatiana Riabouchinska (aged 15).
Collectively they became known as the
“Baby Ballerinas” and all three became
important stars. Balanchine was often
drawn to young dancers, beginning with
Alicia Markova, who was thirteen when he
created the lead in Le Chant de Rossignol
for her. During his years at New York City
Ballet Tanaquil Le Clercq, Allegra Kent,
Suzanne Farrell and Darci Kistler all became
muse figures for Balanchine while they
were still in their teens. Balanchine loved
their clean, unmannered dancing. He never
tried to efface their individuality but instead
sought through his teaching and dancemaking to bring forward and nourish each
dancer’s special qualities and gifts—a
practice he followed with all of his dancers.
Balanchine created three works for Blum
and de Basil, each of which featured some
combination of the “baby” ballerinas: La
Concurrence, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,
and the much loved dream ballet Cotillion.
However, Balanchine found de Basil difficult
to work with. He later described de Basil as
“an octopus. A crooked octopus, and with
bad taste” (Gottlieb 65). In any case, Les
Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo was too
caught up in an attempt to revive the lost
glamour of Diaghilev’s company to appeal
to the forward-looking Balanchine.
Finally, in 1933, he formed his own
company: the short-lived Les Ballets 1933,
for which he created six new productions
including his first version of Tchaikovsky’s
Mozartiana. Twice during his American
career Balanchine returned to this ravishing
score. The version he made for New York
City Ballet in 1981 was his last great work as
a choreographer and a final gift to Suzanne
Farrell.
The financing for Les Ballets 1933 was
precarious, and despite the strength and
variety of Balanchine’s work and the lavish
production designs only two brief seasons
in Paris and London took place. In London
the company failed to draw a large
audience. It was clear Les Ballets 1933
would not live to see 1934. Balanchine’s
future in Europe was dim. His health
troubles resurfaced. He had few prospects
for work that interested him, and the
economic and political situation was
growing dark.
Lincoln Kirstein and America: 1933-1946
In the audience during the Paris and London
seasons of Les Ballets 1933 sat a twenty-sixyear-old American named Lincoln Kirstein
(1907-1996). The wealthy, Boston-bred,
Harvard-educated Kirstein fell in love with
ballet at an early age—the atmosphere of
glamour and artistic experiment that
surrounded Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes
fuelled what became an obsession. At the
age of seventeen he saw the company
perform for the first time during a trip to
England, and his fate was sealed. “It was
exactly as if I had come home to a splendid
country for which I knew I had been
destined, but which up to that point I could
not seem to find” (Taper 148). Kirstein
became an aesthete with a mission. An
independent, truly American tradition of
ballet did not exist in 1933; classical ballet
was quite simply a European art form.
Kirstein dreamed of creating an American
ballet, one with a distinctive American
voice—and he had the means, connections,
and commitment to make his dream real.
With additional financial backing from his
Harvard classmate and friend Edward M.M.
Warburg, Kirstein had come to Europe in
search of a choreographer. Having seen
6
both Apollo and Prodigal Son on a previous
trip, he was already familiar with
Balanchine’s work. Now Kirstein invited
Balanchine to create a company in America,
and Balanchine, “feeling he had nothing left
to lose at that point in his life,” said yes
(Dunning 26).
The two men couldn’t have been more
different. Balanchine was supremely selfconfident, certain of his gifts and destiny.
He was famous for his calm, poised
demeanor. He possessed both courage and
strength of will strengthened in part by his
intense Orthodox faith and by the hardships
he had experienced during the revolution.
Kirstein, for all his accomplishments, was
often insecure and prickly. He suffered
through terrible bouts of depression and
mental illness. Despite these differences
Balanchine and Kirstein committed
themselves to what must have seemed at
times an utterly impossible project. Over
the course of the next fifty years they would
together build American ballet’s two
greatest institutions, The School of
American Ballet and New York City Ballet.
“But First a School”
Famously, it was the school that was
established first. Balanchine had watched
Diaghilev struggle unsuccessfully to
maintain a high level of dancing in his
company once he was cut off from the
great Russian academies following the First
World War and the Russian Revolution.
Without a first rate school from which to
draw talented and disciplined dancers the
company’s dancing was, in Balanchine’s
words, a “disaster” (Dunning 39). He also
knew first-hand that the Maryinsky’s
connection with the Imperial School was
vital to that company’s success. It was
exactly this system that Kirstein and
Balanchine sought to replicate when they
officially opened the doors of The School of
American Ballet (SAB) in New York City on
January 2, 1934, just three months after
Balanchine’s arrival in America. In short
order the school was drawing students from
around the country. By 1934 a number of
American-born dancers who would make
their names with Balanchine had already
arrived at the school, including William
Dollar, Lew Christensen, Ruthanna Boris
and the phenomenal Marie-Jeanne. SAB
became the cornerstone of the Balanchine
enterprise in America: “In 1934 we opened
the school here,” Balanchine recalled.
“From then on I don’t count. That’s my
biography” (Dunning 47).
An American Choreographer: 1934-1948
Two months after the opening of SAB
Balanchine clapped his hands after class
and told the students: “take rest…we will
make some steps” (Gottlieb 77). Those
steps became Serenade (1935), the first
ballet Balanchine made in the United States
and, in the words of Bernard Taper, “the
first of any consequence created for
American dancers” (156). The students
enrolled at SAB in 1934 had for the most
part no professional experience, although a
number were quite gifted technically.
Balanchine overcame the lack of experience
by facing it squarely. In doing so he created
one of the greatest works in the ballet
repertoire. It is a ballet that Balanchine
revised over the years and it has gone
through many changes both in terms of
structure and costuming (originally the
women wore short plain tunics); but it
remains, along with Symphony in C and the
ubiquitous Nutcracker, perhaps his most
loved ballet.
He inscribed the very situation he faced in
the classroom into the opening tableau of
the ballet. It is a stunning moment: the
curtain rises on seventeen women in anklelength tulle skirts—Barbara Karinska’s
elegant variation on the Romantic tutu—
the whole scene is bathed in a cool blue
light, like moonlight. Each dancer stands
with one armed raised, a yearning,
aspirational gesture. As Tchaikovsky’s music
takes wing, they move through a series of
7
simple gestures or poses like students in a
classroom and then suddenly to the
sounding of a chord, all at once, they move
into first position—the elementary position
of classical ballet. We are watching a ritual
of transformation: a group of young,
untried students is being turned into
classical dancers. The keynote of the ballet
is simplicity, Balanchine is applying the
lessons in restraint he learned while making
Apollo, but this is a lush, sweeping simplicity
rooted in the sweep and rush of
Tchaikovsky’s score.
Serenade is now seen as something of a
calling card announcing Balanchine’s arrival
as an American choreographer. The ballet
contains many elements of what we now
consider the Balanchine style:
“distinguished music as ‘floor,’ absence of
star dancers, simple or nonexistent
costumes and décor, using the corps de
ballet as a full participant, the absence of
pretext or plot, the primacy of
choreography” (Reynolds 268).
Serenade received its New York premiere
on March 1, 1935, on a program that
included five other Balanchine ballets. The
run marked the New York debut of the
American Ballet, the first company formed
by Balanchine and Kirstein. An ambitious
tour was planned but collapsed after just a
few dates when the tour manager
absconded with the house receipts. The
American Ballet found refuge of a sort from
1935 to 1938 as the resident ballet
company at the Metropolitan Opera House
but ran afoul of the conservative taste of
both management and audience.
Balanchine directed a major production of
Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice there in 1936
with striking décor, lighting, and costumes
designed by Pavel Tchelitchev (1898-1957).
He moved the singers offstage into the pit
with the musicians, while his dancers, like
Greek vase paintings sprung to life, played
out the story onstage. Tchelitchev created a
phantasmagorical setting of white and silver
tree branches. The underworld was eerily
roofed over with the dangling roots of trees
that towered “halfway up the stage”
(Mason 165). The opera drew cheers from
intellectuals, artists, and writers, but was
too innovative to please either the dusty
Met audiences or the stodgy New York
music critics. The reviews were scathing,
and the opera was performed only twice.
However, as Kirstein proudly put it shortly
afterward:
A few American painters, poets,
architects, writers, musicians,
actors, and stage-directors on
seeing it at both performances have
never forgotten it. Take it or leave
it, here in 1936 was an attempt
towards living theater (33).
A misunderstood masterpiece, Balanchine’s
1936 Orpheus and Eurydice has entered the
realm of theatrical legend. It lives on too in
George Platt Lynes’s haunting series of
photographs of the production that vividly
capture the charged eroticism of the
choreography. Balanchine would return to
the Orpheus legend and to Gluck’s opera
repeatedly during the course of his career.
A Stravinsky festival held at the Met in 1937
was a far more successful undertaking in
terms of critical response. It included the
American debut of Balanchine’s Apollo with
Lew Christensen dancing the lead and two
new Balanchine-Stravinsky ballets, Le Baiser
de la Fée and Card Game (the score of
which had been commissioned for the
festival). Stravinsky’s presence as conductor
and the festival’s success with both press
and audiences were not enough to salvage
Balanchine’s relationship with the
Metropolitan, and in 1938 he was fired.
Broadway and Hollywood
While still working at the Metropolitan,
Balanchine began a parallel career making
dances for Broadway shows and revues.
During this period he moved between the
8
worlds of popular entertainment and high
art with the same ease he had shown in the
period after Diaghilev’s death. His first job
came in 1935, creating dances for the
Ziegfeld Follies—including a long number
for Josephine Baker (1906-1975) an old
acquaintance from his Paris years. In 1936
he had his first big success with the Rodgers
and Hart musical On Your Toes, for which he
demanded and received credit as
“choreographer”—a first for a Broadway
dance-maker. He went on to design
innovative choreography for such hits as
Babes in Arms, Cabin in the Sky, The Boys
from Syracuse, and Where’s Charlie. He also
broke ground for later innovators, including
Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins,
creating the first “dream ballet” sequence
in a show (for Babes in Arms, 1937), and
pioneering the integration of dance with
storyline. His close collaborators included
such important dance figures as the
Nicholas Brothers, Ray Bolger, and
Katherine Dunham. The influence of tap
and jazz dance styles can be seen in a
number of Balanchine ballets including
Concerto Barocco (1941), The Four
Temperaments, and Agon to name only a
few. Balanchine’s ballet tribute to the songs
of George Gershwin, Who Cares (1970)
nostalgically evokes the flavor of his
Broadway years as well. And of course the
influence of Fred Astaire on Balanchine’s
work has often been noted. Although the
two never worked together, Balanchine
admired Astaire’s work enormously. In her
autobiography, Maria Tallchief finds traces
of Astaire’s influence in both Theme and
Variations and Symphony in C and describes
The Four Temperaments with its jazzy
elements and forward thrust hips as
steeped in “George’s contemplation of
Astaire” (Tallchief 84).
Balanchine also found work in Hollywood
during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Beginning in 1937 he worked on a series of
films for Samuel Goldwyn, all of which
starred the glamorous Vera Zorina (1917Copyright © 2012 Dance Heritage Coalition
2003), who became his wife in 1938. He
was able to bring with him to Hollywood a
number of the dancers from the American
Ballet. Beginning with The Goldwyn Follies
(1938) he created a series of fantastical
balletic dance sequences designed to
highlight Zorina’s otherworldly beauty.
Balanchine had worked in film once only
once prior to his Hollywood adventure
when he created a dance sequence for one
of the first feature-length talking films
made in Britain, Blood Red Roses (1930),
but he quickly mastered the art of making
epic dance sequences for the camera by
using special effects and composing
passages “directly to suit the camera field
and the camera angle” (Denby 521). He
made dances for four more Hollywood films
following The Goldwyn Follies: On Your Toes
(1939), I Was an Adventuress (1940), Star
Spangled Rhythm (1942), and Follow the
Boys (1944).
Balanchine’s most unexpected foray into
popular entertainment came in 1942 when
he created The Ballet of the Elephants for
Ringling Brother Circus in which the
elephants “danced” to a score he
commissioned for the occasion—
Stravinsky’s Circus Polka.
The South American Tour
In 1941 Balanchine and Kirstein formed a
new company called American Ballet
Caravan that began a four-month-long
good-will tour of South America
underwritten by a division of the American
State Department headed by Nelson
Rockefeller. With war raging in Europe and
fears high that the United States would be
drawn into the conflict, the Roosevelt
Administration embarked on a program to
shore up cultural relations between North
and South America. Ballet was used to
sweeten America’s image abroad. For this
tour Balanchine created two of his greatest
works: Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial
(renamed Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2
in 1973). Ballet Imperial was a lavish
9
recreation of Maryinsky classicism and the
Franco-Russian tradition of Petipa. The
ballet’s bravura footwork and lightning-fast
jumps and turns for the principals perfectly
mirror its glittering Tchaikovsky score.
Concerto Barocco, set to Bach’s Concerto for
Two Violins, is sparer, with fewer fireworks
but with sweeping, liquid adagio sections.
Both dances dispense with any pretense of
plot and both show how adept and
innovative Balanchine had become in his
use of the corps de ballet. Rather than using
the corps in the conventional way, as
window dressing for the stars, Balanchine
creates a complex conversation among the
corps, the ensemble, and the principals—
weaving them together in intricate and
surprising patterns. In ballet after ballet,
from Serenade on, his corps de ballets are
not the anonymous dancing phalanxes of
tradition, but real individuals playing a
major role in the unfolding dance. In
Barocco, Balanchine gives the corps de
ballet as much to do as he gives the soloists.
His restructuring of the relationship
between soloists and corps involved a break
with the old hierarchies of classical ballet
and is one of the most important and
influential of Balanchine’s formal
innovations.
Denham’s Ballet Russe: 1944-1946
Shortly after the tour ended, America
entered the Second World War. Kirstein
enlisted in the army, and American Ballet
Caravan folded. Balanchine spent the next
years (1944-46) working for Serge
Denhams’s New York-based Ballet Russe de
Monte Carlo. Energized by the prospect of
working once more with a large company of
dancers, Balanchine quickly and efficiently
revitalized the moribund Ballet Russe. He
introduced new productions of Serenade,
Baiser de la Fée, Ballet Imperial, and
Concerto Barocco to the repertoire and
mounted revised, largely new versions of
his Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1944) and
Mozartiana (1945). The Ballet Russe
dancers responded enthusiastically to
Balanchine’s coaching and to the new
repertoire, which was a drastic departure
from the choreographic re-workings of old
Diaghilev formulas that had been the
company’s bread and butter.
Balanchine found himself working closely
with a number of dancers who had been
trained at SAB. The most prominent of
these was slim, long-legged Mary Ellen
Moylan. She had previously danced in a
number of Balanchine works at various
venues. Under his careful eye she
developed into a dancer who possessed all
of the traits—speed, strong attack,
musicality, and eloquent but unmannered
feet and hands—that would be identified
with the “Balanchine ballerina.” The
freshness, athleticism, and lack of old-world
airs exemplified by Moylan lay at the heart
of Balanchine’s new American style. He had
been refining this style since the creation of
Serenade in 1935. By 1943 Edwin Denby
had already spotted these qualities in
dancers Balanchine had trained or
rehearsed: “They have an indefinable grace
in dancing that seems to come naturally to
them, that seems extemporaneous. They
look not so much like professionals but like
boys and girls dancing” (103). During
Balanchine’s first decades in the United
States ballet audiences expected to see
dancers move with a hyper-theatrical
hauteur which was associated with both the
European past and the glamour of the
Diaghilev era. Throughout Balanchine’s
career both critics and audiences often
accused his dancers of coldness, of being
anti-theatrical and depersonalized. That
today we accept and often expect ballet
dancers moving with the unaffected grace
described by Denby speaks to the
tremendous revolution Balanchine has
wrought.
During his Denham Ballet Russe period
Balanchine was reunited with Alexandra
Danilova. One of the great ballerinas of the
century, Danilova was the company’s prima
10
ballerina. She had been a student at the
Imperial School with Balanchine and a
member of his Young Ballet. Together they
had escaped Russia and joined Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes. For a time during the
Diaghilev years they lived together in a
common law marriage, and Danilova was
his muse. It was for her he created the great
role of Terpsichore in Apollo. Many years
later, at Balanchine’s invitation, Danilova
joined the staff of SAB, becoming an
influential and much loved teacher. Now,
Balanchine made a series of new roles for
her in Danses Concertantes (1944) and,
most unforgettably, as the sleepwalker in
the neo-Gothic Night Shadow (later
renamed La Sonnambula) (1946). Drawing
on their memories of the old Maryinsky
version, the two also mounted a full-scale
production of Petipa’s Raymonda (1946)
that was in many ways ahead of its time—
American audiences still had not developed
a taste for evening-length ballets.
Still, Balanchine’s most fateful meeting
during this period was with a young up-andcoming member of the company named
Maria Tallchief (b. 1925). Tallchief was
already attracting attention with her
powerful, dramatic dancing. Balanchine
spotted her gifts, in particular her potent
musicality, and was immediately drawn to
her. He became her teacher, mentor, and,
in 1946, her husband. Over a period of
many years he completely rebuilt and
transformed her technique. Under his
tutelage she became the foremost ballerina
in the United States and the first Americanborn prima ballerina to be recognized
internationally. She created roles in over
twenty-five of Balanchine’s ballets, and her
great popularity with audiences helped
keep New York City Ballet afloat during the
company’s financially difficult early years.
On the surface Denham’s Ballet Russe
seemed to be a congenial home for
Balanchine. The company introduced his
work to audiences across the country
during its many tours and in 1945
presented a two-evening celebration
devoted to his dances. He was also able to
stock the company with young American
graduates of SAB. However, Balanchine and
Denham never quite saw eye to eye.
Denham never granted him the title of
artistic director, and Balanchine needed and
wanted more control over repertoire than
Denham would give him. Most of all
Balanchine loathed the incessant touring,
which made it difficult to maintain the
company’s dancing at a high level.
Ultimately Balanchine’s aesthetic vision was
at odds with Denham’s more commercial
and retrograde view, and he left the
company in 1946. Fortunately the South
American tour had renewed Balanchine’s
and Kirstein’s shared commitment to
creating a permanent company centered on
Balanchine’s choreography and American
dancers. When Kirstein returned from the
war, the two men would embark on a new
venture that would, at last, lead directly to
the creation of New York City Ballet.
Ballet Society: 1946-1948
Balanchine’s and Kirstein’s previous
attempts at creating a company had to a
large extent foundered on exigencies
connected with working in the commercial
theater, primarily the relentless focus on
box-office receipts and the outsized power
and interference of theater owners and
managers such as those they had
encountered during their time at the
Metropolitan Opera. Both men felt an
extreme distaste for the commercial
machinations of promoters, like Sol Hurok,
who insisted on bankable stars and
conservative crowd-pleasing productions.
Then there were the dance critics. John
Martin of the New York Times was the most
powerful of them, and he had taken a
negative view of Balanchine’s endeavors in
the United States from the start. For
Martin, if there were to be an American
ballet it could never be the creation of a
Russian-born choreographer who practiced
11
what he called “Riviera esthetics” (Taper
162). To reread Martin’s condescending
reviews of Balanchine’s masterworks of the
1930s and 1940s is to be left stunned as
Apollo, Serenade, Symphony in C, and The
Four Temperaments are each in turn
casually, waspishly dismissed as uninspired
and dull. Martin dogged Balanchine and
Kirstein for decades, only coming to
recognize Balanchine’s greatness during the
New York City Ballet period.
These were a few of the obstacles
Balanchine and Kirstein faced when in 1946
they founded Ballet Society. The new
venture was designed to subvert the
commercial system that had so bedeviled
them in the past. It was a membership-only
company. Anyone could purchase a
subscription, but the idea was to build an
audience of high-brow connoisseurs, artists,
and intellectuals who appreciated new and
challenging work. Critics could attend only if
they purchased subscriptions, and they
were asked not to review the company’s
performances. The plans for Ballet Society
were ambitious. While the ballet company
would be at the heart of the endeavor there
would also be opera productions, concerts,
poetry readings, and film screenings. The
program for Ballet Society was impractical
to say the least, and financially impossible
to maintain.
However, the work Balanchine created for
Ballet Society during its two years of
existence was, in its emotional range and
formal invention, a prelude to the
miraculous span of creative activity that
took place over the next thirty-five years at
New York City Ballet. The most important
works Balanchine made for Ballet Society
were The Four Temperaments (1946) and
Orpheus (1948).
The Four Temperaments is set to Paul
Hindemith’s Theme with Four Variations,
which had been commissioned by
Balanchine years earlier with money he
earned from his work on Broadway. As the
dance begins a man and a woman stand like
twins, side by side in silence. He offers her
his hand, and as she accepts it we hear the
lush ceremonious strings of Hindemith’s
score. The simple clarity of this first gesture
is breathtaking. The offering and taking of a
hand is one of the fundamental gestures of
classical ballet. Balanchine takes that series
of movements and, without altering its
simplicity, heightens its power and (coupled
with the music) makes it dramatic in much
the same way he used first position in the
opening of Serenade (1935). What follows,
however, is a jaw-dropping display of
invention and anything but simple—
modern, fast, and unprecedented in the
way it distorts and reconfigures the
language of classical ballet. Throughout The
Four Temperaments Balanchine creates
novel, astonishing ways of moving through
space. Balanchine draws primarily from the
classical vocabulary in The Four
Temperaments, but many critics also see
the influence of American modern dance, of
African-American dance styles, Broadway,
and Fred Astaire in the ballet’s syncopated
“tap-like” steps, asymmetry, out-thrust hips
and crumpled bodies (Banes 66-67). But the
influences have all been fully absorbed into
Balanchine’s own miraculous language.
The ballet is as tightly woven and intricate
as a Persian carpet.
From its first performance The Four
Temperaments has been recognized as a
masterpiece and over time has become one
of the most loved of Balanchine’s dances,
cherished by audiences, dancers, and critics
alike. Time Magazine’s special millennium
issue of December 31, 1999, called it the
greatest dance of the 20th century, placing it
alongside other masterpieces of modernism
from Eliot’s The Wasteland and Joyce’s
Ulysses to Matisse’s Red Studio.
The collaboration between Balanchine and
Stravinsky on Orpheus was perhaps the
closest ever between a composer and
12
choreographer. Lincoln Kirstein
commissioned the score for Orpheus in
1946 but Balanchine had discussed the
ballet with Stravinsky as early as 1945. The
two had of course collaborated before,
most famously on Apollo, but their working
relationship grew closer as they drew up
plans for this new ballet. They began
working side by side at Stravinsky’s home in
Los Angeles, plotting out each scene of the
ballet, deciding on the exact length of every
section—all before the score the was
composed. Stravinsky and Balanchine
continued to work together in New York as
the ballet took shape, and Stravinsky
conducted the premiere. Isamu Noguchi’s
décor and costumes, Jean Rosenthal’s
lighting, and Balanchine’s choreography all
harmonize with Stravinsky’s luminous score
to produce an unusually unified work of art.
On the surface Orpheus appears to go
against the grain of much of what we think
of when we think of a Balanchine ballet.
First and foremost, Orpheus is more a
dance-ritual, or what today would be
termed “dance theater,” than a
conventional ballet. It is a dance that tells a
story by the great master of non-narrative
dance. It is a dance built primarily from long
passages of slow movement (and stillness)
by a master of speed. It is a dance with few
obviously virtuosic steps by the master of
balletic virtuosity. The entire work depends
less on classical steps than on a modernist
vocabulary of mime and gesture. However,
it may be that we have a general tendency
to make of Balanchine’s work too neat and
uniform an oeuvre. We tend to overlook
Don Quixote, Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and Prodigal Son. We tend to remember
instead the non-narrative black and white
ballets such as The Four Temperaments and
Agon. When viewed in proper perspective
among the full range of Balanchine’s
dances, Orpheus appears less of an oddity
even if it sometimes takes his gifts in
directions that he chose not to follow up in
later work. And it remains the case that
among the works that Balanchine made
following the end of his collaboration with
Tchelitchev, Orpheus stands alone as an
example in which décor, costume, and
lighting serve as equal partners to dance
and music.
Orpheus has an especially important place
in the history of the New York City Ballet.
Morton Baum, the chief financial executive
of the New York City Center for the Arts
happened by chance to see Orpheus after
wandering into a rehearsal. He was so
moved by what he saw on stage that he
experienced what he termed an
“epiphany.” Indeed, Baum felt compelled
following the experience to invite the
homeless and financially failing Ballet
Society to take up residence at the City
Center. Thus was born New York City Ballet
(Goldner 24). Isamu Noguchi’s distinctive
design for Orpheus’ lyre became the
company’s emblem. After fifteen years of
struggle Balanchine and Kirstein had at last
found a permanent home.
New York City Ballet: 1948-1983
All of Balanchine’s previous training and
experience—his early years at the Imperial
School and the Maryinsky, the years making
dances for Diaghilev, for companies small
and large in Europe and America, on
Broadway and in Hollywood —culminated
in his thirty-five-year reign as ballet master
at New York City Ballet. He ruled the
company, with assistance from Kirstein and
a small dedicated staff, as a benevolent
autocrat involved not only in the making of
ballets but also in teaching, rehearsing,
casting, and planning programs and
subscription seasons. No detail of music,
lighting or costumes was too small to
receive his attention. While the company
did present the works of other
choreographers, most importantly those of
Jerome Robbins, it was Balanchine’s work
and reputation that dominated the
company. “Nowhere else in the world”
wrote John Martin “is there a ballet
13
company that is similarly the creation of a
single mind” (Taper 260).
He was unpretentious about his work and
status. He rejected Romantic notions of
genius and preferred the title of ballet
master to that of artistic director, describing
himself as a craftsman rather than as an
artist. His calm demeanor under difficult
circumstances was legendary. As company
member Richard Tanner put it: “Balanchine
didn’t act like a big star or a great genius.
He acted as…a working person who came in
and did his job” (Mason 561).
Forty-four years old when Ballet Society
morphed into the New York City Ballet,
Balanchine guided the company through its
difficult early years. Financing was
precarious, performances few, and the
audience sometimes so small that the
dancers onstage outnumbered the public
seated in the auditorium. But the audience
soon grew and the company’s
performances became important events in
New York City’s cultural life. A 1950 tour to
Great Britain brought increased recognition
at home. “I shall never forget,” wrote
Balanchine, “the long engagement the New
York City Ballet had at Covent Garden in
1950. It was the longest period up to that
time that we had had to dance on any one
stage, and when we came back to the City
Center the autumn of that year, everyone
knew, I believe, that there was no stopping
the objectives Lincoln Kirstein and I had set
out to accomplish” (656).
Further tours of American cities, Europe
and Asia followed, culminating in a 1962
tour of the Soviet Union—a highly
emotional homecoming for Balanchine.
Grants from the Rockefeller and the Ford
Foundations helped put the company and
SAB on a firmer financial footing. The school
flourished, providing the company with
dancers trained to Balanchine’s exacting
standards. By 1966, when New York City
Ballet moved from City Center to the New
York State Theater at the newly built Lincoln
Center, Balanchine’s name was becoming
synonymous with ballet in America. The
Stravinsky Festival of 1972 was a high-water
mark for Balanchine. The celebration took
place over one week during which thirtyone ballets set to the music of Stravinsky
were presented; of these nine were by
Balanchine, including Stravinsky Violin
Concerto, Symphony in Three Movements
and Duo Concertant. Both for the quality of
the work presented and the sheer
magnitude of the undertaking, the festival
put the seal on Balanchine’s reputation.
Further festivals dedicated to Ravel (1975)
and Tchaikovsky (1981) followed.
Balanchine had built what was arguably the
greatest performing arts institution of his
time. At the heart of the enterprise was the
repertoire he created for the company.
Variety had always been a mark of his work,
but now he needed to build a diverse
repertoire that would please audiences year
after year. The variety of the dances he
created and of the moods and images he
conjured is truly astonishing. He often
compared himself to a chef creating a
meal—appetizer, main course, and dessert.
In the first years of the company’s existence
he created dances as different as The
Firebird (1949), a showpiece for Tallchief
and the company’s first box-office smash;
Bourrée Fantastique (1949), a high-energy
comic ballet designed as a program
“closer”; and the Romantic, doom-laden La
Valse (1951). In 1954 with The Nutcracker
he returned to his youth at the Maryinsky,
recreating many of the dances he
remembered from the St. Petersburg
production, including the “Candy Cane”
variation he had danced so successfully as a
young man. In the process he both created
an American holiday tradition and helped
set New York City Ballet on a firm financial
footing. When he turned to the past or paid
homage to tradition as in The Nutcracker,
Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, Allegro
Brillante (1954), or Donizetti Variations
14
(1960), among many others, he never
created a pastiche or stale reconstruction
but, instead, made something bold and
new. “The past and present seem to
happen” in these ballets “at the same time
as they do in the drama of personal
memory” (Denby 101).
His most radically modernist works, from
The Four Temperaments and Agon (1957)
through Ivesiana to Episodes (1959) and
Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), are not
only formally ingenious, they are also
powerful emotional experiences. Danced in
black and white “practice clothes,” without
sets and governed by complex, difficult
modern music rather than by plot, these
dances are stripped-down but also richly
textured. We may admire the Agon pas de
deux primarily for its formal invention, but
it also “touches the imagination with a
mysterious expressive message,” all the
more powerful for not being clearly spelled
out (Denby 522). Both Agon and The Four
Temperaments have a rhythmic exuberance
that seems distinctly urban and American.
While their primary impetus derives from
their musical scores, there is something of
the sharp energy of New York in both
works. It is this energy—and the speed and
clarity characteristic of Balanchine style—
that dancer Jean-Pierre Bonnefous had in
mind when he said, “to dance his ballets I
think you have to learn to be part of New
York” (Jowitt 255).
Other works Balanchine created for New
York City Ballet touch directly on American
themes or images. Western Symphony
exuberantly links classical ballet with the
atmosphere of the old West. Ballerinas and
cavaliers become dance hall girls and
cowboys. In Square Dance (1957) he
introduces a “caller” and something of the
formal geometry of square dancing into a
classical ballet set to the music of Corelli
and Vivaldi. Stars and Stripes is a tongue-incheek rendition of 4th-of-July-style
patriotism set to Sousa marches.
As Balanchine prepared the company for
the shift to the much larger stage at Lincoln
Center he began creating dances on a more
lavish scale. The dancer Patricia McBride
feels he was already thinking about the
move when he created the evening-length
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1962
(Mason 439). Following the first season at
Lincoln Center in 1964 he created Don
Quixote and recreated Petipa’s
Harlequinade (both 1965), and in 1967
came the first plotless evening-length
ballet, Jewels.
These were also the years in which Suzanne
Farrell became a dominant presence both
onstage and off. Balanchine fell in love with
her and created for her a series of roles that
displayed her commanding presence,
musicality, and bold, fluid dancing. Don
Quixote, the Diamonds section of Jewels,
Chaconne (1976), and Vienna Waltzes
(1977) all revealed a dancer who could
encompass both lush lyricism and offbalance risk taking.
The strength of the entire company was at a
peak. Night after night audiences crowded
the New York State Theater in the 1960s
and 1970s, eager to see the latest
Balanchine masterpiece.
Muses and Dancers
“The choreography,” Balanchine once said,
“the steps—those don’t mean a thing. Steps
are made by a person. It’s the person
dancing the steps—that’s what
choreography is, not the steps themselves”
(Taper 321). It is probable that when
Balanchine spoke those words he had a
woman in mind. Ballet, he said, “…is a
woman” (Gottlieb 201). Over the course of
his career he created ballets for many of the
twentieth century’s greatest ballerinas.
Some became muses. Four of them he
married: Tamara Geva, Vera Zorina, Maria
Tallchief, and Tanaquil Le Clercq. In her
memoirs Danilova (with whom he lived
from 1926 to 1933) says, “For most of his
15
career, I think art and romance were all
wrapped up together—there was no
distinguishing between them” (187). The
Balanchine ballerina has been characterized
as tall, thin—a greyhound with a cool stage
presence. There is no doubt that this type
became dominant during the New York City
Ballet years. However, the women who
became his muses and his archetypal
dancers did not present a uniform picture.
Among them were Geva, Danilova, Zorina,
Tallchief, Le Clercq, Diana Adams, Allegra
Kent, and Farrell. When one remembers
their dancing or sees film of their
performances one finds nothing uniform or
impersonal about them. What stands out is
the tremendous individuality of these
women. All of Balanchine’s dancers share a
clean, crisp clarity of line, speed, musicality,
and an absence of “ballet star” affectations.
The male dancers he worked with shared
these traits. During his years in America he
created roles for a remarkable group of
men who brought a new naturalness and
athleticism to the ballet stage; among them
were Francisco Moncion, Todd Bolender,
Jacques d’Amboise, Edward Villella, Arthur
Mitchell, and Peter Martins. Balanchine
created a modern American cavalier
stripped of fussiness and princely
affectations. He trained his male dancers to
be as fast and flexible as his women.
He once told Tallchief that he would be best
remembered as a teacher. As she put it,
“He was patient. He let a dancer in on the
process, allowed her to see what was
happening, to feel she was building herself
up through what he was asking her to do.
He helped dancers establish faith in
themselves” (119). His company class was
famously challenging, and it was through
those classes that he created the dancers
he needed for his ballets. One dancer
recalled, “he grew as a choreographer as
the dancers grew. If he changed Symphony
in C or Serenade over the years, it was
because the dancers could do more. He
and the dancers developed together”
(Mason 357). The Balanchine style was
characterized by, among other things, a
distinctive open arabesque, fast footwork,
big extensions, and full turnout. In class he
often forced the dancers to focus on the
simplest elements of training: tendu and
the presentation of the foot, plié. His
dancers’ mastery of these elements allowed
them to move with a stunning strength and
ease. When a Balanchine ballerina dances
on pointe, it never looks like a stunt but
appears natural and unforced. In his ballets
there is none of the “step and pose” found
in so much earlier ballet choreography;
instead the movements flow like music in
long sequences and phrases. He wanted
every movement, whether fast or slow, to
be performed with the greatest possible
fullness and energy. Nearly every dancer
who worked with him has told of his
incredible skill and elegance when
demonstrating movement in class or while
making a ballet. During his old age he
moved with a grace that even his young
dancers felt they never could replicate.
Final Years
By 1979 Balanchine’s health was in decline.
He suffered from heart disease and failing
eye-sight and was beginning to exhibit
symptoms of the neurological disease that
eventually killed him. A number of the
dances he created during this time make
both overt and indirect references to death,
and it is clear that he was wrestling with
feelings about mortality in his last great
works, Robert Schumann’s
Davidsbündlertänze (1980) and Mozartiana
(1981). As part of the 1981 Tchaikovsky
Festival, Balanchine choreographed the last,
“Adagio Lamentoso,” movement of
Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony—the
Pathétique. Performed twice and never
revived, the dance was a ritualized
theatrical enactment of Tchaikovsky’s great
lament, a requiem complete with Byzantine
angels and processions of hooded monks.
As the symphony draws to its melancholy
16
close, a boy enters dressed in white and
carrying a candle. He stands stage center.
As the melody falters and fades in a dying
fall, the child extinguishes the candle,
plunging the theater into darkness.
Balanchine was saying farewell to the art
form and the audience he loved. The little
boy who stood enraptured on the stage of
the Maryinsky at the start of his career had,
after so many years, come full circle.
The dances he created changed the face of
ballet in America and across the globe. The
institutions he built, The New York City
Ballet and the School of American Ballet,
have survived his passing. His dances
remain the most important and the most
loved part of the New York City Ballet
repertoire. SAB continues to keep his
teaching practices alive, and the school’s
graduates fill the ranks of NYCB and of
dance companies the world over. His work
and his vision of ballet as a modernist
twentieth century art form have influenced
generations of choreographers from Jerome
Robbins to Twyla Tharp, William Forsythe,
Christopher Wheeldon, and Alexi
Ratmansky. Several generations of his City
Ballet dancers have formed an everexpanding Balanchine diaspora, founding
dance companies and schools from Seattle
to Miami and from Kansas City to
Washington D.C. Young choreographers
either imitate his style or turn against it, but
they all grapple with his influence. His
ballets, which he once compared to
ephemeral butterflies, are performed
regularly by companies around the world.
“…We know one very important thing about
Balanchine,” said the critic Edwin Denby in
1983, “he changed the way we look at
dance. Very few people in the history of any
art have that kind of impact” (492).
Several months before his death,
Balanchine was presented with the very
first copy of Choreography by George
Balanchine: A Catalogue of Works. No
other choreographer’s work before or since
has been the subject of a true catalogue
raisonné. The book was brought to his
hospital room on Christmas Eve, 1982.
When the catalogue was presented to
Balanchine, he reached out and placed his
finger on the image blazoned on its title
page. It is the lyre of Orpheus as designed
by Pavel Tchelitchev for the fabled
production of Gluck’s Orpheus in 1936.
After Balanchine’s death, on April 30, 1983,
this same image, the lyre of Orpheus, was
inscribed on his tombstone.
List of Works Cited
(Balanchine:) Balanchine, George, revised
by George Balanchine and Francis Mason.
Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great
Ballets. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
(Danilova:) Danilova, Alexandra. Choura:
the memoirs of Alexandra Danilova. New
York: Knopf, 1986.
(Denby:) Denby, Edwin, ed. Roger Cornfield
and William MacKay. Dance Writings.
Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press,
1986.
(Dunning:) Dunning, Jennifer. "But First a
School." New York: Viking, 1985.
(Garafola:) Garafola, Lynn (ed.), with Eric
Foner. Dance for a City. New York: Columbia
University, 1999.
(Gottlieb:) Gottlieb, Robert. George
Balanchine: the ballet maker. New York:
Harper Collins, 2004.
(Homans:) Homans, Jennifer. Apollo’s
Angels: a History of Ballet. New York:
Random House, 2011.
(Jowitt:) Jowitt, Deborah. Time and the
Dancing Image. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
17
(Kirstein:) Kirstein, Lincoln. The New York
City Ballet. New York: Knopf, 1973. Textonly reprint, Thirty Years, with added
material through 1978. New York: Knopf,
1978.
(Mason:) Mason, Francis, ed. I Remember
Balanchine: recollections of the ballet
master by those who knew him. New York:
Doubleday, 1991.
(Reynolds:) Reynolds, Nancy and Malcolm
McCormick. No Fixed Points. Dance in the
Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003.
(Tallchief:) Tallchief, Maria, with Larry
Kaplan. Maria Tallchief. America’s Prima
Ballerina. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
(Taper:) Taper, Bernard. Balanchine, a
Biography. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
(Volkov:) Volkov, Solomon. Balanchine’s
Tchaikovsky: Interviews woith George
Balanchine. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985.
Damien Jack formerly worked in publishing
and as a journalist in New York City. He is
currently a student at Portland State
University in Portland, OR, where he is
studying dance history and writing with a
focus on 20th century dance.
18

George Balanchine (1904-1983)

Transcription

Similar documents

Balanchine, Backhaus...Meet Broad

Our Batrlet Limhers {-TP - The Dance History Project of Southern

Coppélia

SF Ballet 2016 Repertory Season

Week 6 - Burklyn Ballet Theatre

View 2016-17 School Programs Brochure

ballet folklorico quetzalcoatl examples of sponsorship benefits

A Dancer`s Director

new york city ballet george balanchine`s the nutcracker