George Balanchine Research Articles

Web-based collaboration, live musical performance and open-form scores

ABSTRACTAs Internet-based social listening, composition and improvisation applications become increasingly important cultural mechanisms through which to experience, create and share digital music, the author seeks to create comparable systems to engage audiences within the context of live musical performances. Real-time collaboration with audiences during performance can lead to exciting and rewarding musical experiences. But the technical, logistical and design constraints at live venues, including simultaneous participation and single-stream output, make such live participation systems challenging to create and deploy effectively.This article instead focuses on linking web-based collaborative experiences with more traditional live musical performances. The article explores the motivations behind such hybrid performance works and the history of them, and it then discusses and evaluates two recent works by the author, Graph Theory (2006) and Piano Etudes (2009), both of which use open-form musical scores as a structural framework for participation.

Ballet Nations: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 US State Department–Sponsored Tour of the Soviet Union

In 1962, the New York City Ballet performed in Moscow as part of its eight-week US State Department–sponsored Soviet tour while the world anxiously watched the unfolding of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This article examines the coincidence of these events from the perspectives of dancers who traveled on the tour, demonstrating how arts programs, even when sponsored by the US government, do not export a consolidated, coherent representation of US national identity. Using oral-history interviews with dancers who traveled on the tour and choreographic analysis of George Balanchine’s ballet Serenade (1934), the article explores how the dancers’ experience and ballet’s hybrid origins undermine cold war narratives of the United States and the USSR as polar opposites.

The Art of the Ballets Russes Captured: Reconstructed Ballet Performances on Video

It is impossible to underestimate the influence of Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) on twentieth-century ballet history. But it may be easy at times to underestimate his uncanny ability as an impresario to bring together artists from diverse backgrounds and aesthetic and unite them with a common goal of artistic excellence. Established in 1909, the Ballets Russes made an extraordinary impact on Parisian life and monopolized the audiences' attention for almost two decades. More than simply being a ballet company, it promoted and facilitated the interaction of some of the most avant-garde artists of the time. During their twenty-year run (the company disbanded in 1929 after Diaghilev's death), the Ballets Russes collaborated closely with dancers, choreographers and visual artists that included George Balanchine (1904-1983), Vaslav Nijinsky (1890-1950), Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), Mikhail Fokine (1880-1942), Leonide Massine (1896-1979), Leon Bakst (1866-1944), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Some of the musicians who either lent their scores to be choreographed or created music particularly for the Ballets Russes included Maurice Ravel (Daphnis & Chloe), Claude Debussy (Jeux), Richard Strauss (Josephslegende), Erik Satie (Parade), Manuel de Falla, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, and, of course, Igor Stravinsky. The latter's groundbreaking collaboration with Diaghilev led to three landmark works, all inspired by the composer's native Russia: Firebird, Petrushka, and the notorious Rite of Spring. THE WORLD OF ART By the time Diaghilev realized his interest in the arts at the dawn of the twentieth century, the world of the romantic ballet had virtually been dead for years. At its zenith, it was represented by works such as La Sylphide and Giselle, made popular in Europe in the 1830s and 1840s mainly thanks to the superhuman accomplishments by ballerinas like Marie Taglioni (the first Sylphide), whose graceful ballons and ethereal dancing on pointe (a novelty at the time) ideally embodied the concepts of the otherworldly and the supernatural. The geography of European ballet history in the later part of the nineteenth century makes for a fascinating read. In spite of the immense popularity that it enjoyed in France until the middle of the nineteenth century, the formulaic and predictable aspects of ballet that once made it popular, now failed to sustain the public's taste for the exotic and the extravagant (which, interestingly enough, both ballet and opera shared). Around that time, Marius Petipa (1818-1910), the greatest choreographer of the time, had moved to Russia, where he established the standard for classical ballet with a series of legendary creations that included Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. In 1869, he was appointed chief ballet master in St. Petersburg and was single-handedly responsible for defining classical ballet, as well as for putting the Russian Imperial ballet at the forefront of European ballet in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Ironically, France would regain its former ballet glory through the opposite trajectory, this time via Russia with the help of the Ballets Russes. (1) Diaghilev was neither a dancer, nor a choreographer, nor a composer, nor did he aspire to become the great impresario of a Russian ballet company that would take the Parisian audiences by storm and that would have a tremendous impact on twentieth-century ballet history. It was rather through Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), the group and art journal he founded in 1898, that his artistic aspirations became manifest. With the help of artists who shared his symbolist aesthetic, such as Alexandre Benois (1870-1960) and Leon Bakst, he put on art exhibitions in St. Petersburg and Paris, and soon it became apparent that his goals would be better served with him as the intellectual force behind the talent and aspirations of young artists he would help promote. …

Following the dream/passing the meme: Shakespeare in ‘translation’

In this article I will investigate why Shakespeare's plays are sites of translation- adaptation-appropriation par excellence for memetic propagation within and across cultures. I will explore one of Shakespeare's most famous and beloved works, as well as one of his most adapted, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and refer to a number of adaptations, appropriations, variations or even evolutionary mutations, as one might call them in the terminology of gene and meme theory. What I am principally interested in, for the purpose of this article, is the question of relevance and applicability of memetic concepts to Shakespeare, himself one of the most significant cultural phenomena of the last 500 years. As arguably the most influential adapting and subsequently adapted author of all time, Shakespeare is ideal for the purposes of the present study. The sheer popularity, regularity of performance and cultural continuity of A Midsummer Night's Dream makes it, along with Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, highly representative in its universality. I will refer to a number of diachronic appropriations and adaptations, including Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen, Benjamin Britten's more faithful operatic version of the play and George Balanchine's sumptuous 1962 ballet version based on Mendelssohn's famous score. I will also discuss the current vogue for Asian adaptations of Shakespeare with a number of examples, focusing especially on Jung Ung Yang's recent appropriation of Shakespeare's Dream into a traditional Korean theatrical idiom for Seoul-based Yohangza Theatre Company.

Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance Peter Glazer William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer, eds . Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 301 , illustrated. $69.95 (Hb). Focusing on theatrical texts from the Columbian Exposition of 1893 to James Scruggs’s 2005 solo piece Disposable Men, Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance has a performance and publication genealogy of its own. Co-editor William Demastes invited editors and contributors to Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor’s Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre (1999) to revisit the topic in the 2005 conference, “Writing, Teaching, Performing America.” Papers from that conference and others stimulated by the dialogue led to the present collection. The table of contents suggests that the book would be a valuable addition to a survey course in American Studies or U.S. theatre and performance, and I might use it myself because of its scope, the objects of study, and the quality of many of the chapters. But be forewarned: containing more editorial errors than appropriate and inconsistent in its scholarship, Interrogating America is a mixed bag. While the Palgrave Macmillan series of which it is a part is “devoted to the best of theatre performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon” (Series description, ii), I might have tolerated a little jargon in exchange for more consistently trenchant, precise, and sophisticated prose. In the case of one essay, in particular, it would be better to use it as an exemplar of poor writing and editing than to teach its often unconvincing content. Using Langston Hughes’s “America poems” as inspirational models, Ladrica Menson-Furr’s chapter analyses the plays of August Wilson and Ed Bullins as modern manifestations of cycle dramas that [End Page 640] “sing America” (200). This topic is worthy, but I blame the editors for allowing the essay to be published with so little oversight. It is rife with grammatical errors, awkward constructions, inadequate citations, and questionable claims. To call “one of the numerous themes, if not the fundamental theme” of Wilson’s oeuvre “the difficulties and complexities of life” feels wildly insufficient, and to state that Jitney “is the only play in Wilson’s cycle (maybe with the exception of Radio Golf) that was composed during the time in which it is set” suggests a casual and disconcerting insecurity on the part of the author about her subject (210, 211). There are brighter moments. Amy E. Hughes writes well on pre–Civil War plays and readings that advocated both anti- and pro-slavery positions, while laying claim to a Christian morality. Noelia Hernando-Real focuses on Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors, arguing that the play uses an amalgam of modernist techniques to call for a higher American ideal. The complicated reception and interpretation of Brecht by U.S. companies during the New Deal is detailed by Ilka Saal, who asks whether Brecht failed Broadway or did “Broadway fail Brecht” (116). In the only piece on dance, Andrea Harris productively integrates social and critical theory with dance theory and practice to scrutinize George Balanchine’s abstract style as a historicized manifestation of American anxiety. Drawing on David Harvey, she uses Balanchine’s work to map the “new liberalism” of America’s post-war era (Harris 147). Jacqueline O’Connor’s essay defending Luis Valdez’s imaginative Zoot Suit and Steve Feffer writing on Len Jenkin’s fascinating My Uncle Sam are also sharp and engaging. In one of the collection’s strongest pieces, Mike Vanden Heuvel brings information theory to bear on John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation to stunning effect. He cites the work of Michel Serres, who parallels information theory and social practice, noting that the word “parasite” – a fitting description of Guare’s “interloper” Paul – is French for “static,” commonly “noise” or “interference” (234, 235). Parasite Paul’s intervention in the Kittredges’ liberal comfort “first distorts information, but then unexpectedly produces more complex messages regarding the degrees of difference by which Americans are separated” and “introduces greater complexity into [the Kittredges’] lives” (235, 239). The “America” under consideration is an ethos more than a place, a sense of promise and...

Episodes (1959): Entente Cordiale?

This article investigates Episodes (1959), which was a co-production by the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company. It assesses the immediate and longer-term impact of the work, both conceptually and choreographically, and the extent to which it can be considered ‘a historic meeting of two dance worlds’, as the New York Post claimed at the time. The article also explores the motivations of the three key figures involved – George Balanchine and Martha Graham as co-choreographers, and Lincoln Kirstein, General Director of NYCB – and the different working practices of the two companies. It draws upon dancers' accounts of the co-production, including Paul Taylor who performed in Balanchine's choreography, and extensive correspondence between Graham's company and NYCB.

Episodes (1959): Entente Cordiale?

This article investigates Episodes (1959), which was a co-production by the New York City Ballet and the Martha Graham Dance Company. It assesses the immediate and longer-term impact of the work, both conceptually and choreographically, and the extent to which it can be considered ‘a historic meeting of two dance worlds’, as the New York Post claimed at the time. The article also explores the motivations of the three key figures involved – George Balanchine and Martha Graham as co-choreographers, and Lincoln Kirstein, General Director of NYCB – and the different working practices of the two companies. It draws upon dancers' accounts of the co-production, including Paul Taylor who performed in Balanchine's choreography, and extensive correspondence between Graham's company and NYCB.

Balanchine's La Valse: Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies

The interpretation of Ravel’s La Valse by George Balanchine (1904–83) opens up new avenues of study for Ravel scholars by inviting enquiry into a complex web of relationships among music, choreography, literature, and historical context. Specifically, the choreographer’s superb visualization of La Valse (1951) yields additional meanings and implications for Ravel’s music—and, more speculatively, for his biography. By extension, the question is raised as to what theoretical-critical framework(s) might help to probe these relationships. In engaging with these issues, I hope to show that Balanchine’s realization can mediate powerfully between so-called “inherent” musical meaning and meaning that emerges through an examination of sociocultural forces (theorized broadly after Nicholas Cook).1 Balanchine’s choreography, I would argue, successfully negotiates both poles to open up ontological issues and intertextual networks that emphasize some of Ravel’s most recognized musical attributes. Finally, in light of Benjamin Ivry’s controversial biography, I maintain that Balanchine’s work permits hermeneutic enquiry into the composer’s possible homosexuality, and his preoccupation with death.2

Ashton and MacMillan in Fairyland: Contrasting Styles in Le Baiser de la Fée

choreographer for the Vic-Wells Ballet is surprising. The story is complicated and the initial performance of the work, by the Ida Rubinstein company in 1928 with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, had mixed reviews.3 Ashton knew this well?he had danced the role of a peasant in it?but he felt that the problem was caused by the ungainly dancing of Rubinstein, who played the Fairy.* He chose the ballet because he loved the score and, in an article written in November 1935, he hinted that the music as op posed to the story would take precedence.4 If Baiserwas an unlikely story for Ashton to tackle, it was even more so for Kenneth MacMillan, whose scorn for fairy stories is well known.5 But he, too, was drawn to the music and mounted his version in 1960, later reworking it for a revival in 1986. According to Lynn Seymour, who danced the Bride, her first major role for MacMillan, "Baiser was Kenneth's homage to Frederick Ashton."6 And she points out that because of the earlier Ashton version in which Margot Fonteyn danced the role of the Bride, many critics drew parallels between the Ashton-Fonteyn partnership and that of MacMillan and herself. But forming celebrated dance partnerships

Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fée: Ghost Stories

It is a commonplace today that our understanding of a work of art incorporates the tradition that the work creates about itself, and also the resonances between it and other work of the past? memories, traces, even ghosts. Such a sprawl of reference might well have a profound effect upon how we interpret a work, even its shape through time, even upon what we perceive as its most poignant and most unsettling moments. The trouble in dance is that we rarely have the resources to get at the more subtle potential of this kind. Reading a work through another work? Sensing a ghost in a new work? There has been much more of this kind of interpretive activity in music, literature, drama, and the visual arts, but when it can be undertaken in dance, the rewards are great, a greater intensity of experience and intel lectual, aesthetic, and sensual pleasure. For aiding and encourag ing this, the George Balanchine Foundation must be applauded for giving us increased resources, and resources that can be used alongside each other and to many different ends. Certainly, it has contributed greatly to the tracking of the ghosts in Balanchine's Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fee, created in 1972, with additions made in 1974, but also a history long before that. Balanchine first made a real, full Baiser for the American Bal let in 1937. This was a ballet in four scenes, forty-five minutes long, reflecting the manner of the nineteenth-century ballet. Stravinsky had used Hans Christian Andersen's tale The Ice Maiden, with its theme of the muse's fatal kiss, and also borrowed many themes, mostly from Tchaikovsky's songs and piano music, to compose a homage to Tchaikovsky. His score was dedicated to this composer:

I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving * The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir * Confessions of a Video Vixen * How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving * The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir * Confessions of a Video Vixen * How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale

I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leavingby Elizabeth Hayt; New York, Warner Books, 2005, 293 pages, $24.95 by Toni Bentley; New York, Regan Books, 2004, 208 pages, $24.95 by Karrine Steffans; New York, Harper Collins, 2005, 224 pages, $24.95 by Jenna Jameson; New York, Regan Books, 2004, 592 pages, $27.95

I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leavingby Elizabeth Hayt; New York, Warner Books, 2005, 293 pages, $24.95 by Toni Bentley; New York, Regan Books, 2004, 208 pages, $24.95 by Karrine Steffans; New York, Harper Collins, 2005, 224 pages, $24.95 by Jenna Jameson; New York, Regan Books, 2004, 592 pages, $27.95

Bringing Bourrées to Broadway: George Balanchine's Career in the Commercial Theater

Bringing Bourrées to Broadway: George Balanchine's Career in the Commercial Theater

Balanchine's Bodies

This article examines ways in which dancers, dancing and choreography came to embody ideas of American identity and power after the Second World War. It does this through a study of the work of ballet choreographer George Balanchine. I focus on an analysis of one particular ballet, The Four Temperaments(1946), which proved to be a defining work in Balanchine's career. Balanchine arrived in New York from Europe in 1934 and spent the next decade as an itinerant choreographer whose ballets were viewed as part of a decadent Franco-Russian tradition. However, after the close of the war, Balanchine's reputation underwent an enormous shift. He came to be considered the creator of an American balletic style and was hailed by many as the country's greatest choreographer. Balanchine's rise coincided with America's assumption of world leadership and the development of the Cold War. I show how a combination of writing and dancing produced Balanchine's choreography, his dancers and, indeed, Balanchine himself, as the embodiment of uniquely American attributes. I argue that this corporeal politics helped meet American ideological goals at home and abroad.

Taylorism, Managerial Control Strategies, and the Ballets of Balanchine and Stravinsky

In the early 20th century, Taylor’s principles of scientific management (i.e., Taylorism) fashioned control strategies that sought improvements in workers’ productivity yet resulted in control of workers’bodies. This article explores the affinities between Taylorism and the ballets Apollo and Agon choreographed by George Balanchine and scored by Igor Stravinsky. Their work embodies a modernist aesthetic influencedby the principles of scientific management, and it reshaped the organization of modern ballet away from focus on the ballerinas and onto the “creative” choreographer and composer.

George Balanchine: the ballet maker

George Balanchine: the ballet maker

Fractal dimension analysis of complexity in Ligeti piano pieces

Fractal correlation dimensional analysis has been performed with whole solo piano pieces by Gyrgy Ligeti at every 50ms interval of the pieces. The resulting curves of development of complexity represented by the fractal dimension showed up a very reasonable correlation with the perceptional density of events during these pieces. The seventh piece of Ligeti’s ‘‘Musica ricercata’’ was used as a test case. Here, each new part of the piece was followed by an increase of the fractal dimension because of the increase of information at the part changes. The second piece ‘‘Galamb borong,’’ number seven of the piano Etudes was used, because Ligeti wrote these Etudes after studying fractal geometry. Although the piece is not fractal in the strict mathematical sense, the overall structure of the psychoacoustic event-density as well as the detailed event development is represented by the fractal dimension plot.

The Demons in a Database: Interrogating ‘Stravinsky the Global Dancer’

Hardly controversial is the claim that the colossus of twentieth century dance composers is Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). However, a new database 'Stravinsky the Global Dancer' (Jordan and Larraine Nicholas, 2003)' enables us better to understand the grounds for this claim. It details over 1,100 dances to his scores and it reveals a mass of choreographers (over 640) who have been inspired by his music and/or who have used it to establish their credentials and their place in the grand tradition. For here was 'the world's greatest living composer', Stravinsky festivals and evenings a route to success, his very name guaranteeing audiences and, indeed, for many, his music symbolised the twentieth century itself. Stravinsky developed an impeccable dance pedigree, working relations with Diaghilev and Balanchine, the one who created twentieth century ballet as an enterprise embracing the most exciting innovations across the arts, the other who for many represents the pinnacle of twentieth century choreography. Stravinsky's music is 'musique dansante', George Balanchine used to say, 'music for the body to dance to ... the floor for the dancer to walk on'.2 He meant not only the scores commissioned for dance, but also a good number composed for the concert hall. Choreographers soon flocked to stage Stravinsky's ballets, and with increasing rapidity as his new scores appeared, but as the years progressed, these gradually stopped. If the Diaghilev ballet commissions were formative, now Stravinsky turned more readily to other forms. The choreographers followed in hot pursuit. By today, practically every Stravinsky score has been used for dance.

I, Maya Plisetskaya

Maya Plisetskaya, one of the world's foremost dancers, rose to become a prima ballerina of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet after an early life filled with tragedy and loss. In this spirited memoir, Plisetskaya reflects on her personal and professional odyssey, presenting a unique view of the life of a Soviet artist during the troubled period from the late 1930s to the 1990s. Plisetskaya recounts the execution of her father in the Great Terror and her mother's exile to the Gulag. She describes her admission to the Bolshoi in 1943, the roles she performed there, and the endless petty harassments she endured, from both envious colleagues and Party officials. Refused permission for six years to tour with the company, Plisetskaya eventually performed all over the world, working with such noted choreographers as Roland Petit and Maurice Bejart. She recounts the tumultuous events she lived through and the fascinating people she met - among them the legendary ballet teacher Agrippina Vaganova, George Balanchine, Frank Sinatra, Rudolf Nureyev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. And she provides fascinating details about testy cocktail-party encounters with Khrushchev, tours abroad when her meagre daily allowance brought her close to starvation, and KGB plots to capitalise on her friendship with Robert Kennedy. Gifted, courageous, and brutally honest, Plisetskakya brilliantly illuminates the world of Soviet ballet during an era that encompasses both repression and cultural detente.

James Kudelka: Extending Ballet's Language

The advent of the millennium provides an occasion for reflection on the past development of ballet's major repertoire and speculation as to its future. The author identifies Frederick Ashton and George Balanchine as the two major choreographers of the twentieth century, because of their essential relationship to Marius Petipa, the dominant choreographer of the nineteenth. He then examines the recent work of James Kudelka, artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, and argues that it forms part of the lineage of Ashton and Balanchine. Ashton's example informs the emotional and thematic content of Kudelka's work, whereas Balanchine's revises and expands the technical vocabulary at Kudelka's disposal. Questions of gender and displacement, implicit in the works of the earlier choreographers, find explicit expression in Kudelka. Whatever the final judgement on Kudelka's body of work, it must therefore be evaluated as part of the mainstream of ballet's development, not as a regional footnote to its history.