Search Results

This chapter follows the events leading to the recreation of the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo in April 1932, describing Blum’s relationship with his partner Colonel de Basil, which soured very quickly, and the exciting and invigorating debut of the company. It details the brilliant premieres that Balanchine as ballet master created for the opening season and the work of several other choreographers, notably Leonide Massine and Michel Fokine. Balanchine was soon replaced by Massine, and this action gave Massine a strong upper hand in the company, with an impressive male contingent bringing the new company tremendous panache. The chapter recounts Massine’s introduction of the symphonic ballet, as well as many other successful creations, and speaks to the major importance of the company’s tours to London and Paris, throughout Europe, and to the United States. The chapter also depicts de Basil’s betrayal of Blum and details the saga of Blum’s contractual efforts to free himself, which he finally did after the Monte Carlo season in 1935. It concludes with the birth of Blum’s new company, the Ballets de Monte-Carlo, with Fokine as the major choreographer.

Although Schumann himself did not compose ballets, a number of choreographers have turned to his music. Despite differences in technique, style, aesthetics, time, and place, a common thread emerges in the “Schumann ballets”: his biography as a source for story and staging. This chapter focuses on Heinrich Kröller's 1922 Viennese Carnaval and George Balanchine's Robert Schumann's “Davidsbündlertänze” (1980), premiered by the New York City Ballet. What unites these two ballets is their use of scores that have implicit connections to the biography of their composer, who represents progressiveness and a spiritual authority for Kröller's and Balanchine's respective artistic visions. Working under Richard Strauss, codirector of the Vienna Opera and Ballet, Kröller shared Strauss's vision for its “reform and modernization.” The Philistines in Kröller's Carnaval were a satirical displacement for the conservative ballet culture in interwar Vienna. Thus the overtaking of the ball in Carnaval by the commedia dell'arte represented the implementation of Strauss and Kröller's reform agenda, with Schumann's visionary blessing. As Balanchine's last major choreography, his Davidsbündlertänze are more than the self‐alignment of his legendary formalist modernism with the antiphilistine composer. Peopled with four couples, Balanchine's ballet explores well‐known aspects of Schumann's biography, particularly his relationship with Clara Wieck and his descent into madness. On a deeper level, however, Robert Schumann's “Davidsbündlertänze” is meta‐Balanchine, constituting the choreographer's dual engagement with formalism and narrative, analogous to what Schumann himself described as the struggle between his alter egos Florestan and Eusebius, his “objective” and “subjective” selves, “form and shadow.”

This chapter begins with details of the motorboat accident that killed Lidia Ivanova as well as the public's reaction to her death. It also considers speculations that her death was not accidental. The discussion then turns to the departure of Lidochka's four friends for their tour on July 4, 1924. Their first stop was Germany, then London, and France, where they auditioned and were accepted into Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. On January 12, 1925, they arrived in Monte Carlo, the company's winter home. Georges eventually made his way to New York City in October 1933. His various American ballets are described.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the authors. A thread runs through Balanchine's teaching that pertains not only to the innovations he made in technique, but also to musicality and timing. The dancer was another musician. But instead of creating sound, the dancer became visible sound. Each and every dancer is just as important as each and every musician in creating the magic of sound and movement. What we take for granted as part of our technique did not exist before the 1950s. Before Balanchine's time, the glissade did not end with both feet simultaneously. The jeté and assemblé with legs held together out to the side, the preparations for steps, and the speed and breadth of movement were what Balanchine added to classical ballet. The intricate partnering in pas de deux and the use of the vibrato that underlies the melody are part of Balanchine's legacy to us.

This chapter assesses the two major choreographic copyright cases that have gone to trial since the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act. In Horgan v. Macmillian, Inc. (1986), an appeals court judge ruled that a book of photographs of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker was “substantially similar” enough to Balanchine’s choreography to warrant an injunction against its publication. In Martha Graham School and Dance Foundation, Inc., and Ronald Protas v. Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, Inc. (2002), a judge ruled that modern dance legend Martha Graham was a “worker-for-hire” for the non-profit corporation that housed her company and therefore not in a position to transfer the rights to her choreography to her heir. This chapter queries the discrepant decisions in these cases, asking whether and how gender continues to inflect copyright formulations of choreographic copyright, and how the “death of the author” plays out in the field of dance.

Chapter 4 analyzes New York City Ballet’s (NYCB’s) 1962 tour of the Soviet Union and the Soviet reception of NYCB choreographer George Balanchine. Previous scholarly accounts have claimed the Soviet reviews of Balanchine’s works were heavily censored, and that, as a result, the tour undermined the authority of the Soviet government with the intelligentsia. Chapter 4 re-examines this tour, using transliteration as a way of modeling the Soviet response to Balanchine. This re-examination shows that Soviet cultural authorities were not at all hostile to the choreographer or his company. The Soviet critics mostly accepted Balanchine’s ballets, but they reframed his accomplishments within their own debates about drambalet and choreographic symphonism. According to Balanchine’s Soviet critics, his works were successful precisely because they reaffirmed the value of the Russian systems of training, artistry, and meaning.

Balanchine was always attempting to produce beautiful gestures, and all of his teaching was directed to that end. The legs must achieve utmost turnout, and jumps must be light and soundless. Probably the two most controversial elements in Balanchine training are the open placement of the hips in all positions of the leg to the back, and jumping so that the heels never touch the ground. To dancers trained in other methods, these two points amount to heresy. Changing what has been learned from one's first ballet lessons requires long indoctrination, as long as learning to dance in the first place. Balanchine had the patience to persist. This chapter discusses turnout, jumping, glissade, turns, arms and feet, signature steps, choreographic devices, changes and versions, and restagings.

This chapter presents some suggestions for ballet teachers. Teachers who depend on students attending their classes for their livelihood, or who have a following of less than totally dedicated serious advanced dancers, should not give classes as Balanchine gave them. They are more for professionals who want to discover the basic purity of each movement and step. They are hard on the body. One must approach them as explorations of the numerous forms of a given theme. What Balanchine's steps give the dancer is an awareness of exactly how a movement should be done musically and physically. Consequently, these combinations are of great value to teachers and to dancers who may be performing Balanchine's ballets.

This chapter describes the components of a Balanchine class. Balanchine's classes are the exploration of specific elements, allowing his dancers to experience exactly how each step is to be done. His classes take you back to the beginning of how a tendu or a relevé should be done, how it will feel and look, and how it should be approached, done slowly or quickly. How do we begin or execute a step so that the audience will be led to perceive the movement as Balanchine designed it to be seen? His classes were explorations in the coloring and texture of the most basic movements in ballet.

This chapter describes the author's experiences as a student at the School of American Ballet when Balanchine needed dancers to form his company. In order to shape his dancers to perform his choreography in the way he desired, Balanchine started to train them in his style. He gave two-hour classes that were designed to help his dancers achieve “perfection,” as the advanced classes at the Kirov school were called. Balanchine's intention was to speed up our development because he needed an instant company.

This chapter focuses on impact of the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s on Georges, Lidochka, and their classmates. As the new economy took shape, they faced not only money problems but personal challenges that graduates before them could not have imagined. Earlier classes had entered a world unified by wartime deprivation. This 1921 class faced a reborn consumer society, for which nothing in their school lives had prepared them.

This chapter focuses on the unique teachers chosen by Balanchine, who provided the technique on which he could build his company. Their classes were demanding, and although they were trained in the same tradition, their classes and strengths were very different from each other. Two special teachers were Anatole Oboukhoff and Pierre Vladimiroff.

This chapter attempts to explain the difference in approach between Balanchine's use of music and the more traditional way of moving musically by considering how Fokine's Prelude from Les Sylphides is danced. In the Prelude, the dancer does not move until she hears the music; in other words, the movement begins with the music and actually ends slightly after the phrase or note so that the dancer almost moves into the next step after the music begins. With Balanchine, the movement almost always begins before the music or note, and actually ends on the note.

This chapter discusses the basic principles of Balanchine's technique. It covers standing, walking, running, tension, dynamics, and five positions. In Balanchine's technique there is never a step in a diagonal direction. The body is always turned to an angle so that all steps are made very definitely to the front, side, or back in relationship to the body, while moving diagonally in the dance area.

This chapter describes events from 1918 to 1920. Early 1918 was marked by continued political turmoil and widespread poverty in the city. Georges, almost fourteen, sewed saddles, ran messages for banks, and played piano in a little movie theater. The girls who weure no longer at the school learned to do things a ballet education had spared them: stand in a food line, light a stove with chair legs, and boil potato peels in water to make soup. In mid-fall, Anatoly Lunacharsky, together with longtime friend Ivan Vasilievich Ekskuzovich, managed to reopen not just the Theater School but its dormitories and kitchens—an event that saved the careers of Lidochka, Georges, and their whole generation. By the fall of 1919, Georges, Lidochka, and their classmates settled back into the routine of ballet class. On May 5, 1920, Georges and Lidochka made their performance breakthroughs together in The Magic Flute.

This chapter revisits how George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein first met and began their collaborative enterprise to found an American ballet company and school in 1933. In addition to seeking out performances by Balanchine’s company Les Ballets 1933, Kirstein took an interest in choreographers Léonide Massine and Serge Lifar. Kirstein ultimately settled on Balanchine as the artistic leader for his venture despite doubts about the choreographer’s health and commitment to ballet pedagogy. Initially the organization was to be located in Hartford, Connecticut, under the auspices of a museum, but owing to misalignment in institutional priorities between Balanchine and Kirstein it was soon relocated to New York City. There is also evidence that Kirstein was the primary advocate of making a school the focus of the organization in its inception and that Balanchine’s primary interest was to create new ballets.

This chapter examines the March 1935 performances of the American Ballet at the Adelphi Theater in New York City, the official premiere of the company and its new repertoire. Preparations for the engagement revealed ongoing disagreement about the direction of the enterprise, and the performances met with a mixed reception. The engagement was an occasion for Kirstein and others to debate the goals and mission of the organization, and dance critic John Martin was one of many critical voices contributing to debate on their efforts. The American Ballet’s activities were in part a response to the Russian ballet companies then active in the United States, notably the troupe led by choreographer Léonide Massine. Massine’s recent innovation of “symphonic ballet” was one of many artistic trends with which Balanchine’s work was in dialogue, most notably in his ballet Serenade.