Balanchine invented ballet as we know it
He was born Georgi Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1904. Trained in the Imperial School of Ballet, he defected after the revolution, coming to the West with nothing more than a few centuries of dance technique in his legs and a forward-looking, populist sensibility.
Here, George Balanchine fell in love with everything American: Sousa, jazz, cowboys and American girls — a number of whom, in Svengali-like fashion, he shaped into prima ballerinas and romanced in a long string of ill-fated relationships.
He was equally at home in the world's great theaters, Broadway and even under the big top. Once, he choreographed a routine for 14 elephants for Ringling Brothers.
But his greatest achievement was to take a hidebound, European art form, strip it of its opera-house trappings, spike it with energy and make it palatable to modern audiences weaned on sports and jazz. In short, he made ballet American, and then watched as American ballet became the official dance language of the Western world.
The twist is, Balanchine and his work both became so famous they faded from view. By the time he died in 1983, his streamlined style had become so pervasive worldwide that we don't even recognize it as his style anymore: It's just "ballet."
On the 100th anniversary of his birth, the choreographer remains an enticing enigma.
Those who worked with him remember him as unfailingly polite but somewhat remote. "He was courtly but never social," recalled Pacific Northwest Ballet co-director Francia Russell, who danced for him at New York City Ballet in the 1950s and '60s.
Commonly referred to in his lifetime as a genius, he dismissed theories of choreography as "too fancy." He vigorously resisted talking about his work in anything other than enigmatic aphorisms. "When you have a garden full of pretty flowers," he once said, "you don't demand of them, 'What do you mean? What is your significance?' "
In the end we have the ballets — five of which will be performed here by Pacific Northwest Ballet and Dance Theatre of Harlem in the next two weeks — and the few, choice words he left behind: Those words can't tell us everything we want to know, but we look at them anyway, hooked by the mystery of the man behind a dance revolution.
"God creates ... Man assembles."
— Balanchine, quoted by biographer Bernard Taper
Balanchine didn't believe in inspiration in the usual sense — creative epiphanies that came on "like a stomach ache." He felt that God, for whatever reason, had endowed him with a choreographic gift, and it was his duty to exercise it.
He was prolific, almost compulsive, and, for someone commonly called a genius, devoid of artistic ego. Others compared him to Mozart and Picasso; he compared himself to a chef or a carpenter. If a passage in one of his dances didn't work (say, because a given ballerina couldn't turn well to the left), he'd toss it out and make up a new one without a second thought.
He made it look so effortless, says his biographer, Bernard Taper, "We forget how much Balanchine had to do to be Balanchine."
After settling in New York in the '30s, he had to establish a school (School of American Ballet), train a new generation of dancers, oversee the design and construction of a stage suitable for ballet (Lincoln Center's State Theater) and commission appropriate scores. Only then could he start his real work — that of making dances.
It's as if a composer, envisioning a new kind of music, had to build all the instruments, show people how to play them, supervise the construction of a concert hall and then teach the musicians their parts, one note at a time — hundreds of times over.
"Ballet is woman."
— Balanchine, quoted by NYCB artistic director Peter Martins
The mental image you have of a ballerina — hair in a bun, legs as long as a Russian surname, bone thin, toes pointed awkwardly out: Balanchine invented it.
Before Balanchine, ballerinas were compact little wind-up toys, trained to spin like tops and hop like springs. They were praised for their charm and dainty proportions.
But Balanchine preferred them streamlined, like long-legged insects with superhuman strength and speed. He bred them that way at his school, demanding extreme turn-out and extension (legs lifted as high as possible), knifelike pointe work and everything fast, faster, fastest.
PNB's Russell recalls, "I had to learn a whole new technique, emphasizing speed and turn-out. Everything had to be more, bigger, better than we thought we could possibly do."
"The music is always first."
— Balanchine, quoted in NYCB biography
Balanchine was a top-flight pianist and widely acknowledged as the most musical choreographer of the 20th century. He used scores by giants of the past (Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky) and commissioned new ones from contemporaries (most notably, Igor Stravinsky).
Being "musical" didn't simply mean aping the music, however.
Russell says, "He didn't just hear the melody or even just the counterpoint. He was inside the architecture of the music; he could follow the composer's train of thought." Several composers credited him with revealing things in their scores — through dance — that they had never noticed before.
Once, modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham, watching Balanchine in rehearsal, said, "It's like watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance."
"There are no sisters-in-law in ballet."
— Balanchine, quoted by Taper
Balanchine liberated dance from storytelling. The great ballets of the 19th-century — "Swan Lake," "Giselle," "Sleeping Beauty" — were fairy tales acted out in movement. To figure out what was going on, you either had to read the libretto or be tutored in the arcane art of ballet mime.
To Balanchine's mind it was all too complicated. He thought dance was compelling enough to stand on its own. This led to a new kind of ballet — sometimes called "abstract" but more accurately called plotless — exemplified by such works as "The Four Temperaments," "Concerto Barocco" and "Agon."
Fifty years ago, plotless ballets were considered shockingly avant-garde; today, they're the norm. Balanchine gave a new generation of choreographers the green light to make dances that were about dancing, elevating the art form to its rightful place alongside music.
"What's the matter with Now?"
— Balanchine, quoted by Taper
Balanchine claimed to have no interest in his legacy. "I'm not interested in later on," he told his biographer, Taper. As far as he was concerned, his ballets would cease to be his ballets after his death, because he would no longer be able to train the dancers dancing them.
"The choreography, the steps — those don't mean a thing ... It's the person dancing the steps — that's what choreography is."
Likewise, he didn't care to read anything written about him or his company. He didn't attempt to influence or shape his published biography in any way. "It's your biography, not mine," he told Taper.
It's here we have to stop to argue with Balanchine.
We say his legacy matters. We tell him his work still surprises and moves us, and that his influence has crept into every corner of the dance world.
Think back to how that world looked before him, at the beginning of the 20th century. All we had were the story ballets of the Imperial theater and the exotic spectacles of Diaghilev. The idea of a man and a woman meeting on a bare stage, dressed simply in tights and leotards, expressing nothing but the music, would've been radical.
Today, Balanchine's vision of pure dance dominates the global stage. His ballets are performed everywhere from Atlanta to Adelaide, carefully guarded and licensed by the George Balanchine Trust. Young choreographers follow in his footsteps, starting with "the music first."
Choreography is now taught in colleges like musical composition, because Balanchine approached it that way. Dancers are trained to conform to his standards; companies (such as PNB) are forged in New York City Ballet's image.
Balanchine invented the art form's past; its future rests on his shoulders.
But he won't hear anything of it: "We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past." There is only, he says, "a continuous present."
Lynn Jacobson: 206-464-2725 or ljacobson@seattletimes.com
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