Kirstein, Balanchine and Others

Abstract

Now is a suitable time for considering in retrospect the summer visit—their first—of the New York City Ballet to Covent Garden. The company consists of some forty-four dancers, led by Maria Tallchief, with Jerome Robbins as guest artist. The soloists are Janet Reed, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Melissa Hayden, Patricia Wilde, Beatrice Tompkins, Nicholas Magallanes, Francisco Moncion, Herbert Bliss, Todd Bolender, Harold Lang, and Frank Hobi. The artistic director and principal choreographer is George Balanchine; the general director is Lincoln Kirstein. It is to these two men that the company owes its inception and its long gestation, for although the New York City Ballet has only been in existence since 1948, it has a genealogical tree which goes back some fifteen years, when George Balanchine, a graduate of the Russian State Academy of the Dance and choreographer to the Diaghilev Ballet from 1925 to 1929, met Lincoln Kirstein in London in 1933, who, desirous of founding an American Ballet, persuaded him to establish a School of American Ballet in New York, where Balanchine, with a teaching staff consisting of Pierre Vladimirov, Anatole Obukhov, Muriel Stuart—long a member of the Pavlova Company—and Kyra Blanc, began the work of training young American dance aspirants who would provide the human material for a permanent company, with which it was intended to present ballets resulting from the collaboration of the most distinguished American composers, designers, and writers—and, later, American choreographers.