George Balanchine

Choreographer

• Born: January 22, 1904
• Birthplace: St. Petersburg, Russia
• Died: April 30, 1983
• Place of death: New York, New York

Russian-born American choreographer

Balanchine, considered the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century, transformed ballet into a diverse, vibrantly contemporary, American medium. He established a training tradition and brought ballet to the forefront of the performing arts in the United States.

Area of achievement Dance

Early Life

George Balanchine (bal-ehn-SHEEN) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, a city more European than Russian in its culture. His father, Meliton Balanchivadze, was a composer of modest means best known for his arrangements of folk songs from his native Georgia in the Caucasus. As a child, Balanchine studied the piano and considered careers in the military or the church. These early plans foretold his future work, which was to combine extraordinary physical discipline with spiritual expression inspired by music.

Balanchine entered the world of ballet by accident. Unable to enroll in the Imperial Naval Academy in August, 1914, he accompanied his sister to an audition at the Imperial School of Ballet and was invited to audition as well. He passed (she failed), and, because of the family’s financial difficulties, he was enrolled and left there the same day. A reluctant student (he immediately ran away from school), Balanchine nevertheless passed the probationary first year. The turnaround in his attitude toward the profession chosen for him occurred during his second year, when he appeared in a performance of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890), performed by the Imperial Ballet Company at the Maryinsky Theatre. The experience dazzled him, and performing became the motivation for undergoing the rigorous training at the school.

Meanwhile, political events were affecting the cloistered, tradition-bound existence of his world. Balanchine entered the Imperial School of Ballet the month in which World War I was declared, and in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution closed the school until the following year, during which time Balanchine scrounged the city for food and took menial jobs to survive. The commissar for education, Anatole Lunarcharsky, convinced Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, chair of the Soviet government, that the performing arts should be considered a valuable heritage of the working class rather than a decadent practice of the aristocracy. While the argument saved the school, this same viewpoint would eventually threaten Balanchine’s early choreographic career.

Reminiscences of fellow students from this period refer to Balanchine’s modest, untemperamental, yet authoritative manner and his great capacity for gaiety and wit. He was a slender, dark-haired man with brooding eyes reflecting an intense concentration.

The groundwork for Balanchine’s unique contributions to choreography was laid as he explored his varied artistic interests. While still a student, he distinguished himself by his unusual musical ability and by choreographing small works for student concerts. On graduation in 1921, he entered the Imperial Ballet Company as a member of the corps de ballet and at the same time became a student at the Petrograd (Leningrad) Conservatory of Music for three years to study piano and composition. At the end of his studies, deciding that he could not become a significant composer, he directed his life totally to the world of ballet.

In the early days of the revolution, there were no consistent policies to inhibit a young choreographer such as Balanchine in his experimentation. Influenced by aspects of the choreography of Marius Petipa (1822-1910), the established Michel Fokine, and his contemporary Kasyan Goleizovsky, Balanchine was drawn to develop a new dance vocabulary that would interpret music and evoke moods, unfettered by the constraints of presenting an actual story and undistracted by complicated costumes and scenery.

In 1923, after the second of his controversial special performances, “Evenings of the Young Ballet,” the directors of the Maryinsky Theatre announced that any dancers taking part in such programs without special permission would be fired. This decree effectively ended Balanchine’s endeavors in the Soviet Union. The following year, he joined a small performing group that had received permission to tour in Germany, and with the first of his four dancer wives, Tamara Gevergeyeva (later Geva), Balanchine left the Soviet Union for the West.

Balanchine saw his education as having two phases: his training in Russia and his five years as choreographer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, a post he obtained shortly after he left the Soviet Union in 1924. Diaghilev was an impresario of remarkable vision and taste, who employed the most notable artists of the early twentieth century, including painters Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, composers Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie, and dancers Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, to create and perform ballets throughout Europe. Both the intellectual elite and the fashionable society of Europe were fascinated by Diaghilev’s experimentation and achievements. Balanchine’s lifelong collaboration and friendship with Stravinsky date from these years.

Life’s Work

Two of Balanchine’s highly acclaimed works of the 1920’s were considered to be turning points in choreographic development: Apollo (1928), for its contemporary interpretation of classical ballet style, which closely reflected Stravinsky’s score; and The Prodigal Son (1929), a biblical theme to music by Sergei Prokofiev, danced expressionistically with a vocabulary inspired by circus movements. After Diaghilev’s death in 1929, Balanchine choreographed for several companies including the newly formed Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and his own struggling group Les Ballets 1933, in Paris.

At this point, Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy, cultivated young American, who sought to establish ballet as a permanent art form in the United States, approached Balanchine and convinced him to embark on this endeavor, assisted by several benefactors, notably Nelson Rockefeller and Edward Warburg. The School of American Ballet opened in New York City in January, 1934, followed a year later by the American Ballet company. Its first performance included Serenade (1935; music by Tchaikovsky), considered by many to be Balanchine’s signature work. During this early period, Balanchine was considered by some critics to be too international and decadent in flavor and therefore not “American” enough to develop an American style and a school of ballet. His experiences in the following dozen years gave him the broadest possible scope of American theatrical enterprises and at the same time enriched them with his own innovations.

The precarious financial position of his company caused Balanchine to affiliate it with the Metropolitan Opera Company. He presented his first Stravinsky Festival in 1937 with Apollo, The Card Game, and The Fairy’s Kiss. He then worked for the Ringling Brothers Circus (he and Stravinsky created a ballet for elephants), Broadway (eighteen musicals and revues), and Hollywood (four films). In the cinema and musical comedy he introduced diversified choreography integrated into the plot, a dream ballet sequence that was a favorite of Broadway choreographers for thirty years, and innovations in filming dance utilizing the advantages of camera effects.

Balanchine’s American Ballet company was summoned back into temporary existence by the State Department in 1941, for a goodwill tour of Latin America. This tour marked the first performing arts sponsorship by the United States government and the beginning of cultural exchange programs. The School of American Ballet became a permanent institution, producing young American dancers of the highest caliber under Balanchine’s exacting standards.

Balanchine and Kirstein founded the Ballet Society in 1946. The premiere included one of his most unusual works, The Four Temperaments, to music by Paul Hindemith, a forceful yet impersonal and technically difficult ballet. In 1948 came Orpheus (with music by Stravinsky), in which the choreography interpreted the Greek legend with great poignancy and dramatic style.

In 1948, the Ballet Society became the New York City Ballet, the resident company of the New York City Center for Music and Drama (owned by the City of New York), the first American ballet company to become a public institution. By this time, Balanchine had choreographed more than fifty ballets and was nurturing a nucleus of dancers, trained at his school, who would develop into the ideal Balanchine dancer: slim, elongated, with impeccable technique and a highly developed sense of musical phrasing that would combine to respond to Balanchine’s complex interpretation of music.

Frequent European tours beginning in 1950 established the company as one of the most important in the world, with a unique repertory and style that would nevertheless continue to be controversial. Important ballets followed, including La Valse (music by Maurice Ravel), Metamorphoses (Hindemith), Opus 34 (Arnold Schoenberg), Ivesiana (Charles Ives), and Western Symphony (Hershy Kay), the last of which reflected Balanchine’s enthusiasm for the Wild West. He was also a guest choreographer for leading European ballet and opera companies.

Balanchine was fascinated by female dancers and often said that “ballet is woman.” His second marriage was to Vera Zorina, his third to Maria Tallchief. His fourth wife, the brilliant young dancer Tanaquil LeClercq, contracted polio in 1956. Although it was feared that Balanchine would retire after this tragedy, he returned to the company the following year and continued to develop his repertory for the next twenty-five years. Agon (1937; music by Stravinsky) completed his Greek mythology trilogy. A contest of technique between dancers, it presented seventeenth century dance forms updated by contemporary rhythms. The Nutcracker (1954; music by Tchaikovsky) his first evening-length ballet, became an annual, sold-out Christmas season presentation.

In 1962, the New York City Ballet made a State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union. While acclaimed for the quality of the dancers and for his choreographic abilities, Balanchine was sharply criticized in the Moscow press for his plotless ballets. Yet the Moscow audience, reticent at first, became highly enthusiastic. Leningrad, more cultivated and Europeanized, was captivated by the performances, which coincided with the beginning of a reaction against Soviet realism in the arts. Throughout the tour, the Soviets attempted to point out Balanchine’s ties to Russian culture. Diplomatically, Balanchine would accept the honors bestowed on him on behalf of the United States and the New York City Ballet and then assert that he was an American.

Tangible successes followed in the 1960’s. The Ford Foundation made an unprecedented grant in 1963 of more than $7.75 million, almost all of which was awarded to Balanchine’s organizations. In 1964, the New York City Ballet became the resident company of the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, which was probably the first theater to be designed according to the specifications of a choreographer. In 1967, the company established a yearly summer residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in New York. Balanchine choreographed four full-length ballets during this decade: William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (music by Felix Mendelssohn), Harlequinade (Ricardo Drigo), Don Quixote (Nicholas Nabokov), and Jewels, the first full-length plotless ballet, with music by Gabriel-Urbain Fauré, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky.

Notable achievements in the 1970’s were festivals for Stravinsky and Ravel (the latter included Le Tombeau de Couperin, choreographed entirely for sixteen members of the corps de ballet, with no soloists), a full-length Coppelia (music by Leo Delibes), the highly popular Vienna Waltzes, and the first of a series of ballet telecasts for Dance in America on National Educational Television. In the 1980’s, despite failing health, Balanchine presented a Tchaikovsky Festival and a retrospective Stravinsky Festival. He died in 1983 in New York City.

Significance

Balanchine brought the Old World art of ballet to the United States, blended its traditions into a contemporary, diversified language, and established his version of it around the country and the world as a uniquely American product. His school became the first institution in the United States to establish permanent, high-quality standards of dance training. He choreographed children’s roles into many of his ballets to give children the same opportunity he had had to experience the joys and wonder of the theater. He organized lecture-demonstration tours for schools, free ballet performances for underprivileged children, free annual seminars for dance teachers, and gave free advice and use of his ballets to other ballet companies. The landmark grant from the Ford Foundation was the signal for other philanthropic foundations to contribute to performing arts organizations in the United States.

In evolving a contemporary choreography, Balanchine was influenced primarily by music, and as such exposed his audience to a vast range of modern as well as earlier composers, including the Americans George Gershwin, John Philip Sousa, and Richard Rodgers. He brought a tradition-bound art form into the twentieth century, freeing it from the excesses of stylization that had obscured the beauty and expressiveness of dance. When presenting a story, a subtly portrayed emotion or outlook, he produced mime and nonballetic aspects that were easily recognizable from everyday gestures. Balanchine’s ballets explored different cultures, human relationships, and theatrical forms, and integrated them into his unique interpretation of the music. He emphasized what has been called an American energy in his dancers. He developed their technical range at all levels and for both sexes, achieving more harmonious dance compositions by greater participation of all the dancers on the stage.

Balanchine’s fifty years of work in the United States brought to millions a highly developed art form that was respectful of its traditions yet forged ahead in innovations and integrated various cultures and fields.

Further Reading

Ashley, Merrill. Dancing for Balanchine. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. Autobiography of a Balanchine dancer with Balanchine as special focus. Gives a fascinating account of Balanchine’s methods as teacher, choreographer, and mentor.

Balanchine, George, and Francis Mason. Balanchine’s Complete Stories of the Great Ballets. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. Plot summaries and historical data on four hundred important ballets. Includes valuable articles by Balanchine of his life and views of ballet.

Duberman, Martin B. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. This biography of Kirstein, the driving force behind the New York City Ballet, describes how he brought Balanchine to the United States and how the two worked together to create a premier American ballet company.

Fisher, Barbara Milberg. In Balanchine’s Company: A Dancer’s Memoir. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. Fisher, a dancer with the New York City Ballet from 1946 through 1958, recalls her experiences working with Balanchine. An articulate and perceptive memoir that describes Balanchine’s choreographic methods and the evolution of some of his best-known ballets.

Gottlieb, Robert. George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker. New York: HarperCollins/Atlas Books, 2004. Gottlieb, a former board member of the New York City Ballet, provides a brief but complete biography.

Katz, Leslie George, and Harvey Simmonds, comp. Choreography by George Balanchine: A Catalogue of Works. New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 1983. Complete chronological list of Balanchine’s 425 works with opening-night casts and notes, and extensive bibliography. Indispensable catalog of Balanchine’s work.

Kirstein, Lincoln. Thirty Years: The New York City Ballet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Interesting, though chatty and somewhat rambling, selective memoirs. Worthwhile secondary text by Balanchine’s patron and adviser.

McDonagh, Don. George Balanchine. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Concise, well-rounded biography combined with analytical discussion of selected ballets and Balanchine’s development. An invaluable study.

Reynolds, Nancy. Repertory in Review: Forty Years of the New York City Ballet. New York: Dial Press, 1977. Excellent historical perspective on the company’s repertory and periods, including informative article on the school and Balanchine.

Teachout, Terry. All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2004. Solid introduction to Balanchine’s life and art for students and general readers, written in a style one critic described as “pithy, conversational, and vivid.”