George Balanchine Essay Research Paper 111300 One

George Balanchine Essay, Research Paper

11.13.00

One of the most important and influential people in the world of ballet is George Balanchine. He became a legend long before he died. He brought the standards of dance up to a level that had never been seen before, and he created a new audience for ballet. Balanchine was one of the greatest and most prolific choreographers in ballet history, choreographing at least 300 ballets; he was rivaled in quantity only by Jules Perrot and Marius Petipa.

At the age of nine he started training at the Imperial School in St. Petersburg. He rarely saw his family because they lived far away and he became the ward of Grigory Grigorevich, who was in charge of the school. There Balanchine performed his first role as cupid in Sleeping Beauty. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Imperial School closed and the students were put out on the street. Balanchine was cut off from his family in the Caucasus, and was taken in to live with Mr. Grigorevich. The school did reopen and Balanchine graduated in 1921. He then joined the Soviet State Ballet. Upon graduation Balanchine married Geva, a fellow student whom he had met in the ballroom dancing class. Geva described her husband as a cross between a poet and a general.

In order to have his choreography seen, Blanchine organized a small company called The Young Ballet, to perform at halturas (bread and butter jobs). At the Maryinsky, Balanchine had been assigned to stage the procession in Rimski-Korsakoff’s opera Coq d’Or, and what he devised, although beautiful, shattered tradition. The company tried to re-train him, but he wouldn’t conform. His choreography continued to be controversial, so the board at the Maryinsky Theater dismissed him from the company. They also threatened all of Blanchine’s dancers with the same fate if they continued to dance for him.

In 1924, with Vladimir Dimitriev’s help, Balanchine, Tamara Geva, Nicholas Efimov, and Alexandra Danilova formed the Soviet State Dancers, and were allowed to tour Germany during the Maryinsky vacation. They decided not to return to Russia, but to defect and go to England. The small company did so poorly in London that they were bought out of their contracts. They then went to Paris in hopes of finding work. Serge Diaghilev heard of this Russian company and sent for them. He hired the four dancers, and also allowed Dimitriev to work for the company. Diaghilev thought the Georgian’s name Balanchivadze was too difficult to pronounce and changed it to Balanchine. Diaghilev was immediately impressed with Balanchine’s creative ballets and wanted him to choreograph for the opera in Monte Carlo. For the Ballets Russes he created Apollo in 1928 and The Prodigal Son in 1929, which have remained Blanchine’s signature pieces to this day. In 1926 Geva divorced him and went to America, and Alexandra Danilova became his “unofficial” wife.

In 1929, while still with the Diaghilev company. Balanchine choreographed and danced in Dark Red Roses, the first talking motion picture in England. It was at this time that Balanchine heard of Diaghilev’s death, leaving him and the entire Ballets Russes without work.

George Balanchine past successes found him work as a choreographer in London, Copenhagen, Paris and also for a new company in Monte Carlo under the sponsorship of the Monaco Royal House. Rene Blum and Colonel William de Basil were the impresario and director of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Balanchine was fired from the Blum – De Basil company because of his unorthodox choreography and was replaced by Leonide Massine. In 1933 Balanchine formed his own company, Les Ballet 1933. It opened to poor reviews in Paris and gave only 20 performances in England.

It was in England that he met his future benefactor, Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy young American. Kirstein, with his friend Edward M.M.Warburg, invited Balanchine and Vladimir Dimitriev to come to America in order to open a ballet school in Hartford, Conn., far away from the enticements of Broadway. Since the stage at the Hartford Museum was too small for ballet performances Balanchine refused the offer.

Kirstein searched the island of Manhattan until he found an appropriate place. The School of American Ballet (SAB) opened at 59th Street and Madison Avenue on January 1, 1934. At first there were only adult students, and the school operated in conjunction with Catherine and Dorothy Littlefield, who already had a company in Philadelphia and had been on a European tour. Dorothy taught at SAB. Harold and Lew Christensen were among the students.

During evening classes at SAB, Balanchine, in order to teach performance skills, choreographed an abstract ballet upon his students using Tchiaikowsky’s Serenade for Strings; called Serenade; this was his first ballet for American dancers. At the request of Edward Warburg’s father, it was first performed in 1934 on the lawn of the Warburg estate in Connecticut. A few months later the group of “four” formed a small company called The American Ballet. It was for this company that Balanchine used, for the first time, an American theme in his ballet Alma Mater.

In 1935 The American Ballet became the ballet company of the Metropolitan Opera Co., but as with the Maryinsky Opera, Balanchine had problems with the management. His dances in Carmen overshadowed the singers. He was able to persu