Choreographer | George Balanchine
George Balanchine
Probably the most important and influential ballet figure in America, he was born Georgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg in 1904. More than three decades after his death in New York in 1983 we can appreciate more fully the huge impact of a choreographer whose creative life spanned 60 years, carrying the grand Russian classical style triumphantly into the modernist era, establishing one of the world’s leading companies—New York City Ballet—and giving America its own classical ballet tradition.
Graduating from the Petrograd Imperial School of Ballet in 1921 at age 17, Balanchine also studied piano and composition, and joined what is now the Mariinsky Ballet, where his first choreographies shocked the company’s traditionally-minded establishment. In 1924 he toured Germany with his own group of Soviet State Dancers until an audition for Diaghilev led to the Ballets Russes acquiring the talents of Balanchine, Tamara Geva (the first of his four ballerina wives), and Alexandra Danilova. Within a year, he was appointed Chief Choreographer, creating 10 ballets for the company, notably Apollo (1928), which Balanchine later described as the great turning point in his life, and Prodigal Son (1929)—both constantly revived to this day.
After Diaghilev’s death in 1929 and the fragmentation of the Ballets Russes, Balanchine worked in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rene Blum’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. It was in London during his directorship of Les Ballets 1933 that Lincoln Kirstein persuaded him to come to America, where they founded the American School of Ballet in New York (1934), out of which emerged The American Ballet (1935), Ballet Society (1946), and eventually the New York City Ballet (1948). Initially based at City Center, it moved in 1964 to its present home at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater, built to Balanchine’s specifications. During the 1930s and 1940s Balanchine also choreographed extensively for Broadway and the movies, including Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes and The Boys from Syracuse. He later married Maria Tallchief (1946-1952) and Tanaquil LeClercq (1952-1969), for whom he also created leading roles.
Balanchine’s ballets are notable in that his musical training enabled him to work closely with the music of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Schoenberg, Webern—some of the greatest names of 20th century music—as well as reinterpret the music of the past: Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. One of the world’s greatest choreographers, he created a neoclassical aesthetic that connected the vigor of American modernism with the Russian ballet tradition. Balanchine now stands as a ballet colossus between America and Europe, his rich repertoire of ballet constantly performed and appreciated around the world.
