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BIOGRAPHY
George Balanchine
Birth: January 22, 1904 in St. Petersburg, Russia
Death: April 30, 1983 in New York, United States
Nationality: American, Russian
Occupation: dancer, choreographer, ballet director
George Balanchine once identified the element of pointe work as a primary motivation for his career as choreographer. "If no pointes existed," he said to Walter Terry in 1962, "I would not be a choreographer. I would not be anything, probably. Perhaps a musician. The pointe made me." As Balanchine tells it, it was seeing three ballerinas at work on pointe in the Imperial Theater School around 1915 that gave him the epiphanal sense of ballet's extraordinary powers. The academically trained dancer and aspiring ballet master came of age in an era of modernism, where the rigors of classical dance were frequently deemed too old-fashioned for the new-world aspirations of 20th-century art. However, unlike those practitioners who sought other, non-pointe methods for showing their modernity, the expatriate Russian, who left his homeland in 1924, took ballet into the modern day by embracing, and advancing, its accumulated technical expertise -- not the least of which was the fairly recent ability for its ballerinas to work confidently on the tips of their toes. What Balanchine rejected were the extra-dance encumbrances that had attended ballet's development out of its opera/spectacle beginnings. Balanchine's ballet became modern by way of its independence from pantomime and literary/narrative concerns.
Of Serge Diaghilev, for whose Ballets Russes Balanchine worked as both dancer and choreographer, the innovative ballet master has said: "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here." During his earliest years outside Russia, Balanchine used the Ballets Russes to advance his modernist theories of ballet. In this atmosphere of European theater traditions, where the "book" was still very much part of a ballet's program, Balanchine worked to emphasize ballet dancing's uniquely poetic powers of expression and to show dancers as something more than diversionary players.
When, at the behest of Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine arrived in the United States of America, where no strict traditions for opera house dance theater existed, he concentrated simultaneously on the training of dancers and on the creation of suitable dances for these artists to perform. He founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and, after various companies of its dancers came and went, established the New York City Ballet in 1948. During his nearly 50-year-long career in the U.S., the Russian émigré established a secure ballet tradition where there had been none to speak of, and in so doing helped change the face of ballet dancing worldwide.
Top banner photos: Aurélie Dupont and Alessio Carbone in "Rubies," the Paris Opera Ballet corps in "Emeralds," and Agnès Letestu and Jean-Guillaume Bart in "Diamonds" (all photos by Francette Levieux). |
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Aurélie Dupont and Alessio Carbone (photo by Francette Levieux). |
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Ballerina Eleonora Abbagnato (photo by Francette Levieux). |
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This program is available on DVD. |
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