Choreographing George Balanchine: The Life as Ballet Program

Abstract

There is an abundance of material written on choreographer George Balanchine (1904–1983), including comprehensive biographies, memoirs by those who danced under his tutelage, articles on and reviews of his ballets, and books on Balanchine technique. There are also two dedicated and bountiful archives—at the New York City Public Library and at Harvard University. Despite this wealth of information on his life and works, it is stated frequently by those who knew him (including his wives) that he was a very difficult man to ‘know’, and that the closest we get to an ‘inner Balanchine’ is through his ballets—a vast and eclectic body of work comprising more than 400 ballets that range from the romantic and popular to the playful and bizarre, from Broadway and Hollywood to his acclaimed responses to such composers as Hindemith and Stravinsky. Using my published poetic biography Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine as a case study, this chapter discusses how poetry’s numerous expressive devices enabled me to approach the writing of Balanchine’s ‘life’ in a way that is attentive to his myriad choreographic contributions. Led by two concepts drawn from research on Balanchine, I explore how formal and stylistic interventions in biography writing—a new biographical poetics—can move beyond conveying the objective facts of a subject’s life story and towards a more subjective, singular and imaginative representation of an individual which is still grounded in a documentable reality.