Maria Tallchief

American ballet dancer

• Born: January 24, 1925
• Birthplace: Fairfax, Oklahoma

Prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet for fifteen years, Tallchief symbolized American ballet for an entire generation of theater and television audiences.

Early Life

Maria Tallchief was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on January 24, 1925, in Fairfax, Oklahoma, a small community on the Osage Nation reservation. Oil discovered on the reservation and the tribal leaders’ insistence on holding their mineral rights in common had made the Osage the wealthiest tribe in the United States. Tallchief’s father, Alexander Tall Chief, a full-blooded Osage, was a well-to-do real-estate executive whose grandfather, Chief Peter Big Heart, had negotiated the tribe’s land agreements with the federal government. Her mother, Ruth Porter Tall Chief, came from Irish, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry. Tallchief's paternal grandmother, Eliza Big Heart Tall Chief, often took her to tribal dance ceremonies, which were held in secret because the US government had outlawed such “pagan” rituals at the turn of the century.

Tallchief began taking piano and ballet lessons at age three; by the time she started school, she was performing before nearly every civic organization in Osage County. In her 1997 autobiography, Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina, she wrote of her childhood that she was intensely shy, although a good student at Sacred Heart, a Catholic school, and loved to be outdoors in her backyard: “I’d also ramble around the grounds of our summer cottage hunting for arrowheads in the grass. Finding one made me shiver with excitement. Mostly, I longed to be in the pasture running around where the horses were.”

Tallchief’s mother, however, wanted a more structured, directed life for her. Concerned about the lack of educational and artistic opportunities on the reservation, Ruth Tall Chief convinced her husband to move the family to Beverly Hills, California, in 1933. There, Tallchief began a rigorous program of piano lessons and ballet classes, the latter taught by Ernest Belcher, whose talented daughter, Marge, would later team up with dancer-choreographer Gower Champion. Ruth Tall Chief was determined to groom her daughter for a career as a concert pianist, but it was dance that captivated both Tallchief and her younger sister Marjorie. In 1938, Tallchief and Marjorie began intensive training with ballet master and choreographer David Lichine; Lichine’s prima-ballerina wife, Tatiana Riabouchinska; and Bronislava Nijinska, sister of the legendary dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and one of the foremost ballet teachers and choreographers in the United States.

With Nijinska, Tallchief learned rigorous discipline and total dedication to dancing; she was taught to think of dancing so thoroughly as to sleep like a ballerina and even stand like a ballerina while waiting for a bus. “We understood what she meant,” Tallchief later told an interviewer. “Ballet is your life. Everything else doesn’t mean that much.” Both sisters impressed Nijinska, and she cast them in her ballet Chopin Concerto, which was performed at the Hollywood Bowl in 1940.

Life’s Work

After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1942 at age seventeen, Tallchief made her professional debut with the New York–based Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, one of the two leading ballet companies in the country at that time. (The other, Ballet Theatre, hired Marjorie Tallchief two years later.) It was early in her five-year association with Ballet Russe that she changed her surname from Tall Chief to Tallchief. Advancing rapidly from the corps de ballet to solo parts, she attracted favorable critical notice in a variety of classical productions, including Bronislava Nijinska’s Chopin Concerto in 1943 and Michel Fokine’s Schéhérazade and George Balanchine’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Danse Concertante in 1944. By 1946, Tallchief’s repertoire also included principal roles in Léonide Massine’s Gaîté Parisienne and two more Balanchine ballets, Baiser de la Fée and Ballet Imperial. Critics and audiences alike recognized her as a rising star in the ballet theater.

Balanchine’s brief stint as ballet master with the Ballet Russe, from 1944 to 1946, marked a turning point in Tallchief’s career. Trained in the Russian Imperial School of Ballet, Balanchine was one of the most brilliant choreographers and teachers of the twentieth century. His School of American Ballet, founded in 1936, trained many of the best performing artists on the American stage. He quickly recognized Tallchief’s potential, made her his protégé, and created roles designed to exploit her strength, agility, and great technical proficiency. On August 16, 1946, Tallchief, then twenty-one, married the forty-two-year-old Balanchine. The following spring, while her husband was a guest choreographer at the Paris Opera Ballet, she made her European debut there—a first for an American. When she returned to the United States, Tallchief joined Balanchine’s new company, the Ballet Society, which in 1948 became the New York City Ballet (NYCB).

From 1948 to 1965, Tallchief was the prima ballerina of the NYCB and originated roles in many of Balanchine’s performances. Two of these roles would become classics of the ballet theater. In 1949, composer Igor Stravinsky revised his score especially for Balanchine’s new version of The Firebird, with Tallchief in the title role. Her electrifying performance as the mythical bird-woman dazzled critics and audiences alike, and for the rest of her career, she would be more closely identified with this role than with any other. In 1954, Balanchine choreographed the NYCB’s most popular and financially successful production, a full-length version of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, with Tallchief as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Tallchief's performance in the role, often regarded as the most difficult role in a classical dancer’s repertoire, earned her the title of “America’s prima ballerina” and helped establish The Nutcracker as an annual Christmas favorite in cities all over the country.

Other works in which Balanchine created roles for Tallchief included Symphony in C (1948), Orpheus (1948), Bourèes fantasque (1949), Sylvia Pas de deux (1950), Jones Beach (1950), Caracole (1952), Scotch Symphony (1952), Pas de dix (1955), Allegro brillante (1956), and Gounod Symphony (1958). In a 1999 interview, she described his choreographic technique: “He would show us how to walk, how to run, how to present your foot. He wasn’t technical. He would just say things so that your whole body becomes very poetic. Being vulnerable is the most important thing of all, and he taught us how to be vulnerable.”

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Tallchief reached the pinnacle of her success as a classical dancer. She toured Europe and Asia with the NYCB, accepted guest engagements with other ballet companies, and gave numerous television performances on programs such as Omnibus, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and The Ed Sullivan Show. She played the famous Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in the 1953 film Million Dollar Mermaid, dancing the Dying Swan role from Balanchine’s version of Swan Lake. She also taught in the School for American Ballet.

Among her many honors, none pleased Tallchief more than those conferred by her home state: June 29, 1953, was declared Maria Tallchief Day by the Oklahoma Senate, while the Osage Nation staged a special celebration during which she was made a princess of the tribe and given the name Wa-Xthe-Thonba, "woman of two worlds." Also in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed her Woman of the Year. A triumphal tour of Russia in 1960 with the young Danish ballet sensation Erik Bruhn cemented her international stardom. Tallchief won a Dance Magazine Award in 1960 and the Capezio Dance Award five years later. She resigned from the NYCB in 1965 and retired from the stage the following year.

Tallchief’s marriage to Balanchine was annulled in 1952 on the grounds that he did not want children, though the split did not end either their friendship or their professional association. According to Tallchief, their age difference and Balanchine's obsession with Tallchief the artist rather than the woman doomed their marital relationship. A brief second marriage to airline pilot Elmourza Natirboff ended in divorce in 1954 when Natirboff insisted that Tallchief give up her career. In June 1956, Tallchief was married to Henry D. “Buzz” Paschen Jr., a Chicago construction company executive who accepted her career ambitions. She gave birth to their only child, Elise Maria, in 1959. Retirement in 1966 allowed Tallchief to settle permanently in Chicago with her husband and daughter.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Tallchief brought to the Chicago artistic world the same energy and determination that had characterized her own dancing. In 1974, she formed the Ballet School of the Lyric Opera, where she passed on to younger dancers the Balanchine techniques and traditions that had shaped her own success. The school’s original purpose was to provide a corps of dancers for the Chicago Lyric Opera. When financial problems forced the elimination of ballet from the opera’s budget, Tallchief engineered the creation of the Chicago City Ballet (CCB) in 1980, using $100,000 in seed money from the state of Illinois and a building donated by her husband. Marjorie Tallchief, retired from her own highly successful career in Europe, moved to Chicago to direct her sister’s school, while Maria became artistic codirector of the new ballet company, along with Paul Mejia. Following the demise of the CCB in 1988, Tallchief returned to the Lyric Opera to direct its ballet activities. In 1989, she appeared in Dancing for Mr. B.: Six Balanchine Ballerinas, a documentary film for PBS. Later she became artistic director for the Von Heidecke’s Chicago Festival Ballet, directed by Kenneth von Heidecke.

Despite her assimilation into European American culture, Tallchief remained proud of her Osage heritage. In 1967, she received the Indian Council Fire Achievement Award, and in 1972 she was named to the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. A longtime member of the Association on American Indian Affairs, she frequently spoke to American Indian groups about involvement with the arts and participated in university programs to educate students about the first Americans. In 1991, Tallchief became a member of the honorary committee of the National Campaign of the National Museum of the American Indian, which was formed to raise funds for the Smithsonian Institution to build the new museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996 and received a Kennedy Center Honor the same year. In 1998, Tallchief was among five Native American ballerinas designated Oklahoma Treasures in a ceremony at the state capitol. President Bill Clinton presented her with the National Medal of the Arts in 1999; in return, she gave him foam rubber for his daughter Chelsea’s ballet shoes to make them more comfortable.

Tallchief’s husband died in 2004. She remained in Chicago near her daughter, Elise Paschen Brainerd, a poet and former executive director of the Poetry Society of America, and her two granddaughters until her own death at age eighty-eight. She broke her hip in December 2012 and died on April 11, 2013, due to complications resulting from the injury.

Significance

Maria Tallchief was the first truly American prima ballerina, as well as the first Native American to achieve such an honor. Four other American Indian ballet dancers enjoyed distinguished careers during Tallchief’s era—Rosella Hightower (Choctaw), Yvonne Chouteau (Cherokee), Moscelyn Larkin (Shawnee), and Marjorie Tallchief—but none left as great a mark on American ballet theater as did the elder Tallchief sister. Ballet as an art form in the United States was relatively new, and until the late 1940s, it relied heavily on European dancers. Even the Ballet Russe, with whom most of the “Indian ballerinas” began their careers, was a European company in exile, staffed largely by artists trained abroad. Not until the 1950s, when the NYCB came into its own as a major ballet company, did American ballet reach the standards set by the prestigious national ballets of France, England, and especially Russia. “Until then,” Tallchief remarked, “the Russians thought Americans could only slap their fannies, chew gum, and tap dance.” If it is true that Balanchine and the NYCB created Tallchief’s prima-ballerina status, it is equally true that she, in turn, contributed significantly to that company’s critical and financial success. American-born and American-trained, Tallchief fascinated audiences with her exotic beauty and her unmatched technical brilliance.

Gifted and driven, Tallchief made personal sacrifices to pursue her demanding career as a performing artist. Then, at age forty and still in peak form, she left the stage to devote more time to rearing her daughter. Like a number of Balanchine’s former protégés, she ultimately went on to teach what she had learned from the master. She modeled her Chicago school after Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York, and until his death in 1983, Balanchine frequently hired dancers trained by Tallchief. A teacher, lobbyist, fund-raiser, and publicist for the arts, Tallchief remained a commanding force in the world of ballet in the years leading up to her death. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted “A Tribute to Ballet Great Maria Tallchief” on November 7, 2006. A year later, in November 2007, Sandra Osawa's documentary Maria Tallchief premiered at the American Indian Film Festival and on PBS.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jack. "Maria Tallchief, a Dazzling Ballerina and Muse for Balanchine, Dies at 88." New York Times 13 Apr. 2013: A22. Print.

Gourley, Catherine. Who Is Maria Tallchief? New York: Grosset, 2002. Print. Meant for high school readers, this short biography outlines Tallchief’s life and offers sidebars explaining the history of ballet. With illustrations.

Gruen, John. Erik Bruhn: Danseur Noble. New York: Viking, 1979. Print. Somewhat gossipy in tone, this biography of the superb Danish dancer contains useful insights into the artistic partnership (and alleged personal relationship) of Tallchief and Bruhn in the 1960s, assessing her offstage persona and later ballet achievements.

Gruen, John.“Tallchief and the Chicago City Ballet.” Dance Magazine Dec. 1984: HC25–27. Print. Examines the progress of the CCB as a major American ballet company in the Balanchine tradition, including Tallchief’s work with her artistic codirector, Paul Mejia, and NYCB star Suzanne Farrell, Mejia’s wife.

Halzack, Sarah. "Maria Tallchief, Ballet Star Who Was Inspiration for Balanchine, Dies at 88." Washington Post. Washington Post, 12 Apr. 2013. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.

Hardy, Camille. “Chicago’s Soaring City Ballet.” Dance Magazine Apr. 1982: 70–76. Details the origins of Tallchief’s ballet company, focusing on the CCB’s premiere of Mejia’s Cinderella.

Kaplan, Larry. "Maria Tallchief: A Personal Recollection." Ballet Review Spring 2013: 24+. Print.

Kufrin, Joan. Uncommon Women: Gwendolyn Brooks, Sarah Caldwell, Julie Harris, Mary McCarthy, Alice Neel, Roberta Peters, Maria Tallchief, Marylou Williams, Evgenia Zukerman. Piscataway: New Century, 1981. Print. One of nine performing artists profiled through extensive interviews, Tallchief speaks candidly about her career as a dancer, her professional debt to Balanchine, and her continuing commitment to ballet through teaching and creating the Chicago City Ballet.

Lang, Paul. Maria Tallchief: Native American Ballerina. Springfield: Enslow, 1997. Print. A short biography intended for young adult readers, this book, part of a series on Native Americans, emphasizes Tallchief's roots. With bibliography and chronology.

Mason, Francis. I Remember Balanchine: Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Print. Tallchief’s contribution to this collection reveals her undiminished admiration for Balanchine’s genius. She discusses their early association at Ballet Russe; describes the creation of her most famous role, in The Firebird; and incorporates anecdotes of their life together.

Maynard, Olga. Bird of Fire: The Story of Maria Tallchief. New York: Dodd, 1961. Print. An incomplete and dated biography that lacks objectivity but gives the fullest account available of the dancer’s early life and rise to stardom.

Myers, Elisabeth. Maria Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina. New York: Grosset, 1966. A sentimental handling of Tallchief’s stage career, based largely on the Maynard biography. Like Maynard’s work, it reveals little about Tallchief the woman and nothing about her career after leaving the stage.

Reynolds, Nancy. "Maria Tallchief (1925–2013)." Dance Magazine. DanceMedia, 6 May 2013. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.

Tallchief, Maria, and Larry Kaplan. Marie Tallchief: America’s Prima Ballerina. New York: Holt, 1997. In her autobiography, Tallchief recalls her shy rural girlhood and transformation into an international ballet star, providing readers with an insider’s acquaintance with many of the leading personalities in the art along the way. With photographs.