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Balanchine (Georgi Melitonovich
Balanchivadze) was born in St. Petersburg (Jan 22, 1904)
into a very musical family and began studying the piano at
age 5. He received a classical education, acting and dance
training, beginning at age 9, from the Imperial Theater
School in St. Petersburg. It was originally thought that
young Georgi would become one of the Tsar's cadets, so it
was with the thought that if things didn't work out at the
ballet school he could always join the army. In fact, in his
first year he was not at all thrilled by what he was
learning. It was only once he got to perform in the
Maryinsky Theater in such spectacles as The Sleeping Beauty
(his favorite) that Balanchine became enamored of the
theater.
Balanchine was raised on the dance
traditions of the classical Russian ballet established by
Petipa. Despite having all the best teachers and dancers in
the world at the time Balanchine states that "Contrary to
popular belief, ballet was not taken very seriously by the
Russian public. It was an entertainment almost exclusively
for the aristocracy, among whom there were perhaps only a
few gentlemen who were not primarily interested in what the
ballerinas were doing after the performance." This changed
with the revolution. Ballet was banned for a period until
the Minister of Education, Lunacharsky, a balletomane,
persuaded the authorities to gradually reinstate ballet.
At some point between 1919 and 1921,
while continuing to dance, Balanchine enrolled in the
Petrograd (Leningrad) Conservatory of Music. There he
studied piano and music theory, including composition,
harmony, and counterpoint, for three years, and he began to
compose music. (In the upheaval of the Russian Revolution,
when money was worthless, he sometimes played the piano in
cabarets and silent movie houses in exchange for bread.) He
became a skilled conductor and pianist and often played for
graduating student performances at the Imperial Russian
Ballet School.
He graduated from the Imperial Theater
School with honors in 1921 at age 17 and joined the corps de
ballet of the Maryinsky, by then renamed the State Theater
of Opera and Ballet, and now the Kirov Ballet.
Balanchine began to choreograph while
still in his teens, creating his first work in 1920 or
earlier. It was a pas de deux called La Nuit, for himself
and a female student, to the music of Anton Rubinstein.
Another of his early duets, Enigma, danced in bare feet, was
performed once at a benefit on the stage of the State
Theater, as well as for some years thereafter, in both
Petrograd and in the West. In 1923 he was able to form a
small troupe, the Young Ballet, for which he composed
several works in an experimental vein, but the authorities
disapproved, and the performers were threatened with
dismissal if they continued to participate. However, in the
summer of 1924, Balanchine and three other dancers were
permitted to leave the newly formed Soviet Union for a tour
of "Soviet State Dancers" in Western Europe. They did not
return. With Balanchine were Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova,
and Nicholas Efimov, all of whom later became well known in
the West. Seen performing in London, the dancers were
invited by the impresario Serge Diaghilev to audition for
his renowned Ballets Russes and were taken into the company.
It was when Balanchine began to work with
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes that he became exposed to a
stimulating array of choreographers, composers and artists
such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Satie, Ravel, Picasso,
Cocteau and Chagall. With the departure of Bronislava
Nijinska from the Ballets Russes in 1925, Diaghilev made
Balanchine, at age 21, ballet master (principal
choreographer) for his company. Balanchine's first
substantive effort was Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges
(1925), the first of four treatments he would make of this
score over the years. Next was a reworking of Stravinsky's
Le Chant du Rossignol, in which 14-year-old Alicia Markova
made her stage debut. From that time until Diaghilev's death
in 1929, Balanchine created nine more ballets, including
Apollon Musagète (1928) and Prodigal Son (1929).
Balanchine was making a movie with former
Diaghilev ballerina Lydia Lopokova (the wife of British
economist John Maynard Keynes) when he heard of Diaghilev's
death. With the
subsequent collapse of the Ballets Russes,
Balanchine began staging dances for Britain's popular
Cochran Revues; acted as guest ballet master for the Royal
Danish Ballet in Copenhagen; and was engaged by its founder
René Blum as ballet master for the Ballets Russes de Monte
Carlo, for which he choreographed three ballets around the
talents of the young Tamara Toumanova - Cotillon, La
Concurrence, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Leaving the
Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, Balanchine formed Les Ballets
1933, with Boris Kochno (Diaghilev's last private secretary)
as artistic advisor and the backing of British socialite
Edward James. For the company's first-and only-season, he
created six new ballets, including The Seven Deadly Sins in
collaboration with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. It was
during Les Ballets 1933 London engagement that, through
Romola Nijinsky, Balanchine met the young American arts
patron Lincoln Kirstein.
Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996, raised in
Boston and a graduate of Harvard University), harbored a
dream: To establish a ballet company in America, filled with
American dancers and not dependent on repertory from Europe.
This he outlined to Balanchine and how he thought he was
essential to it. Deciding quickly in favor of a new start,
Balanchine agreed to come to the United States and arrived
in New York in October 1933. "But first, a school," he is
famously reported to have said.
Kirstein was prepared to support the
idea, and the first product of their collaboration was a
school, the School of American Ballet, founded in 1934 with
the assistance of Edward M.M. Warburg, a Harvard colleague.
(The first classes were held January 2.) The School remains
in operation to this day. The first ballet Balanchine
choreographed in America--Serenade, to Tchaikovsky--was
created for students of the School and had its world
premiere outdoors at Warburg's summer home near White
Plains, New York, in 1934. Within a year, Balanchine and
Kirstein had created a professional company, the American
Ballet, which made its debut at the Adelphi Theater, New
York City, in March 1935. After a handful of summer
performances, a projected tour collapsed, but the troupe
remained together as the resident ballet company at the
Metropolitan Opera. However, the Met had little interest in
furthering the cause of ballet, and in the American Ballet's
three years at the Met, Balanchine was allowed just two
all-dance programs. In 1936, he mounted a dance-drama
version of Gluck's Orfeo and Eurydice, controversial in that
the singers were relegated to the pit while the dancers
claimed the stage. The second program, in 1937, was,
prophetically, devoted to Stravinsky: a revival of Apollo
plus two new works, Le Baiser de la Fée and Card Game. It
was the first of three festivals Balanchine devoted to
Stravinsky over the years.
Stravinsky's description of their work
together on Balustrade in 1940 is implicitly a description
of their shared vision. He wrote, "Balanchine composed the
choreography as he listened to my recording, and I could
actually observe him conceiving gestures, movement,
combinations, and composition. The result was a series of
dialogues perfectly complementary to and coordinated with
the dialogues of the music." (In 1972, Balanchine
choreographed a new ballet to the same score, Stravinsky
Violin Concerto.)
The American Ballet's association with
the Met came to an end in 1938 and Balanchine took several
of his dancers to Hollywood. In 1941, he and Kirstein
assembled another classical company, American Ballet
Caravan, for a five-month good-will tour of South America.
In the repertory were two major new Balanchine works,
Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial (later renamed
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2). But after the tour this
company, too, disbanded, and the dancers were forced to find
work elsewhere. Between 1944 and 1946 Balanchine was engaged
to revitalize Sergei Denham's Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo
after the departure of Massine. There he choreographed
Raymonda, and Night Shadow (later called La Sonnambula, both
in 1946), while reviving Concerto Barocco, Le Baiser de la
Fée, Serenade, Ballet Imperial,and Jeu de Cartes. Ballets
Russes toured the length and breadth of the country for nine
months of the year.
In 1946 Balanchine and Kirstein formed
Ballet Society, presenting to small New York
subscription-only audiences such new Balanchine works as The
Four Temperaments (1946) and Orpheus (1948). On the strength
of Orpheus, praised as one of New York's premiere cultural
events of the year, Morton Baum, Chairman of the Executive
Committee of the New York City Center of Music and Drama,
invited the company to join City Center (of which the New
York City Drama Company and the New York City Opera were
already a part). With the performance of October 11, 1948,
consisting of Concerto Barocco, Orpheus, and Symphony in C
(created for the Paris Opera Ballet as Le Palais de Cristal
the previous year), the New York City Ballet was born.
From that time until his death in 1983,
Balanchine served as ballet master for the New York City
Ballet, choreographing the majority of the Company's
productions. Among his notable ballets were Firebird and
Bourrée Fantasque (1949; Firebird restaged with Jerome
Robbins in 1970); La Valse (1951); Scotch Symphony (1952);
The Nutcracker (his first full-length work for the company),
Western Symphony, (1954); Allegro Brillante (1956); Agon
(1957); Stars and Stripes and The Seven Deadly Sins (1958);
Episodes (1959, choreographed with Martha Graham);
Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Liebeslieder Walzer (1960); A
Midsummer Night's Dream (1962); Don Quixote (in three
acts,1965); Jewels (called the first full-length plotless
ballet,1967); and Who Cares? (1970); Union Jack (1976,
observing the U.S. Bicentennial by honoring Great Britain);
Vienna Waltzes (1977); Ballo della Regina (1978); and
Mozartiana (1981).
In America Balanchine was stimulated by
new dance forms and alloyed them to his broad experiences.
The founding of the School of American Ballet in 1934 and
the New York City Ballet in 1948 gave Balanchine the forums
to institutionalize and present new dance techniques and
ideas to the world.
Balanchine also worked in musical theater
and movies. On Broadway, he created dances for Ziegfeld
Follies of 1936 and On Your Toes, including the
groundbreaking "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" ballet (1936);
Babes in Arms (1937); I Married an Angel and The Boys from
Syracuse (1938); Louisiana Purchase and Cabin in the Sky,
co-choreographed with Katherine Dunham (1940); The Merry
Widow (1943); and Where's Charley? (1948), among others. His
movie credits include The Goldwyn Follies, with its famous
"water nymph" ballet (1938); I Was an Adventuress (1940);
and Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). All starred Vera Zorina.
Embracing television, Balanchine staged
many of his ballets (or excerpts) and created new work
especially for the medium: in 1962, he collaborated with
Stravinsky on Noah and the Flood and in 1981 redesigned his
1975 staging of L'Enfant et les Sortilèges to include a wide
range of special effects, including animation.
Balanchine was married to four of his
ballerinas, Tamara Geva, Vera Zorina (1938-46), Maria
Tallchief (1946-52) and Tanaquil LeClerc (1952-69).
In 1970, U.S. News and World Report
attempted to summarize Balanchine's achievements: "The
greatest choreographer of our time, George Balanchine is
responsible for the successful fusion of modern concepts
with older ideas of classical ballet. Balanchine received
his training in Russia before coming to America in 1933.
Here, the free-flowing U.S. dance forms stimulated him to
develop new techniques in dance design and presentation,
which have altered the thinking of the world of dance.
Often working with modern music and the
simplest of themes, he has created ballets that are
celebrated for their imagination and originality. His
company, the New York City Ballet, is the leading dance
group of the United States and one of the great companies of
the world. An essential part of the success of Balanchine's
group has been the training of his dancers, which he has
supervised since the founding of his School of American
Ballet in 1934. Balanchine chose to shape talent locally,
and he has said that the basic structure of the American
dancer was responsible for inspiring some of the striking
lines of his compositions. Balanchine is not only gifted in
creating entirely new productions, . . . his choreography
for classical works has been equally fresh and inventive. He
has made American dance the most advanced and richest in
choreographic development in the world today."
Balanchine himself wrote, "We must first
realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not
merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is
one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet
is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but
the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The
choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach
the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created
which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of
a magician." Balanchine always preferred to call himself a
craftsman rather than a creator, comparing himself to a cook
or cabinetmaker (both hobbies of his), and he had a
reputation throughout the dance world for the calm and
collected way in which he worked with his dancers and
colleagues.
In the spring of 1975, the Entertainment
Hall of Fame in Hollywood inducted Balanchine as a member,
in a nationally televised special by Gene Kelly. The first
choreographer so honored. The same year, he received the
French Légion d'Honneur. In 1978, he was one of five
recipients of the first Kennedy Center Honors, presented by
President Jimmy Carter. Queen Margrethe II of Denmark also
presented him with a Knighthood of the Order of Dannebrog,
First Class. In 1980, the National Society of Arts and
Letters honored Balanchine with their Gold Medal award, the
Austrian government with its Austrian Cross of Honor for
Science and Letters, First Class, and by the New York
Chapter of the American Heart Association with their "Heart
of New York" award. The last major award Balanchine
received--in absentia--was the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1983, the highest honor that can be conferred on a
civilian in the United States. At the time, President Ronald
Reagan praised Balanchine's genius, saying that he has
"inspired millions with his stage choreography . . . and
amazed a diverse population through his talents".
Soon after, on April 30, 1983, George
Balanchine died in New York at the age of 79.
The Washington Post claims: "[Balanchine]
is to ballet what Tiger Woods is to golf: so far above the
competition as to be playing a different game."
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