George Balanchine loved Fred Astaire, Native American dancing, and the long-legged kicks of American cheerleaders, and he blended it magically with classic Russian ballet.
Long before he died in 1983, George Balanchine had established himself as the 20th-century’s most important ballet choreographer. How a poor boy who was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and fled the Soviet Union at age 20 managed to accomplish this feat is the subject of Jennifer Homans’s massive new biography,Homans trained in dance at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and is currently the dance critic for. She is the ideal person to tell Balanchine’s story.
“A writer sits in a room alone with paper and pencil and what comes out is himself. It represents him, but a choreographer works with living muscles, with dancers who are all individual people,” Balanchine insisted. “If you take away a specific dancer, the step remains, but performed by someone else it may be nothing.”
In Europe Balanchine had success dancing and composing for Sergei Diaghilev’s innovative Ballets Russes, but his own company Les Ballets 1933 folded quickly. What gave Balanchine the artistic independence he wanted and brought him to America in 1934 was the partnership he formed with Lincoln Kirstein, a rich American drawn to the arts. Three years younger than Balanchine, Kirstein was hoping to start a ballet company in America that would rival any in Europe.
The gamble paid off, though at first it required Balanchine working overtime as ballet master at the Metropolitan Opera and choreographing both for Broadway,.
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