International Dazzle

The Massachusetts Review, 2022

A review of George Balanchine's "Raymonda Variations" in the fall 2022 season of the New York City Ballet.

The Massachusetts Review, 2020

Discussion of a cross-section of Balanchine/Stravinsky neoclassical ballets stretching from 1944 to 1972 that were programmed in Fall 2019. The review article posits the idea of Balanchine's late modernism.

This thesis explores the contributions of dancers in performances of selected roles in the ballet repertoires of George Balanchine and William Forsythe. The research focuses on "leotard ballets", which are viewed as a distinct sub-genre of plotless dance. The investigation centres on four paradigmatic ballets: Balanchine's The Four Temperaments (1951( /1946 Forsythe's Steptext (1985) and the second detail (1991). It explores how performers across different company cultures perform and conceptualise several solo roles in these works. The research focuses on the dancers from the choreographers' resident troupes (New York City Ballet, Ballett Frankfurt), and performers in the productions by several international repertory companies.

Ballet Review, 2019

Metropolitan Balanchine or: A "dash of hi-di-hi" In 1935, a new production of Aida, with premiered at the Met with George Balanchine as choreographer. The sight of scantily-clad black men dancing with white women in the "Negro dance" so offended some spectators that Balanchine later altered the ballet. Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen implied Aida ballets were inspired by African-Americanisms, or as she put it, inflected with "a dash of hi-di-hi." Kilgallen's claim was emphatically denied in Blast at Ballet, a polemical pamphlet by Lincoln Kirstein, the young philanthropist who was Balanchine's staunchest supporter. Kirstein foresaw a brilliant future Balanchine as a classical choreographer, and insisted that the inspiration for Aida had come strictly from museums and history books. In this essay, I argue that the uproar caused by Aida’s sexually-charged integrated couple dances illuminates the sharp divisions in a bitter public dispute between Kirstein and New York Times dance critic John Martin over the very definition of American ballet. For Martin (who had pushed for Agnes DeMille to be hired by the Met instead of Balanchine), it required an American choreographer. For Kirstein, it depended, at least until American ballet could become fully established, on "the finest Russian standards" for classical dance. But for Balanchine, who never weighed in publicly in the debate, it relied on American movement styles—which could include the dance vocabulary of contemporary black America and Broadway. Indeed, Balanchine was comfortable working on Broadway and at the Met simultaneously. Moreover, his Aida drew both choreography and style from living African-American dancers—namely, Josephine Baker and the Nicholas Brothers, whom Balanchine was working with on Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 on Broadway at the same time he was creating the Aida ballets. Though some newspaper critics wrote favorably of Balanchine's Aida, Paul Cravath (the Met's powerful board chair) disliked it, and Balanchine was compelled to alter it. Bitter about the controversy, Balanchine soon poked fun of the stodgy Met establishment in an Egyptian number in the 1937 show Babes in Arms.

American Music, 2021

of 1916, amid a flurry of publicity, Serge Diaghilev's famous Ballets Russes company arrived in the United States to begin the first of two back-to-back American tours sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Company. "Never before," the Metropolitan Opera Company's preliminary prospectus announced, "has such a diversity of ballet, mimo-drama, and 'choreographic episode' from such eminent hands been outspread on our stage. Never before have so many ballets moved to such music or been clothed in such settings and costumes. Never before have such performances wrought an equal magic, magnificence, and vitality of illusion. In them the new arts of the dance and many a new art of the theatre touch their present climax." 1 The Ballets Russes, American audiences were promised, would offer Americans a new art, a multimedia spectacle of dancing, music, color, and stage design: "something vital, spontaneous, and distinct, with a rare and poignant beauty, something which evoked within the beholders a spirit at once emotional and intellectual." 2 From January until April 1916, the troupe trekked across much of the Northeast and upper Midwest before a month-long run at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. A second round of American performances commenced in October 1916 with a two-week run at the Manhattan Opera House, followed by stops in more than twenty-five cities around the country-New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis, and Birmingham, among them. The Ballets Russes company originated in a broader series of Russian collaborative artistic ventures. As a young man, impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) was invited to join a "Society for Self-Improvement" aimed at discussing and formulating a set of aesthetic principles that turned away from the utilitarianism and realism dominating much of Russian art and music in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Art,

Modernism/modernity, 2011

Arts, 2020

Choreographer George Balanchine was known for rejecting the premise that his ballets were abstract. Yet, a closer look into his comments on abstraction reveals a greater degree of ambivalence toward the concept than previously noticed. His influential words found response in dance critical writing, where the term “abstract” continued to circulate, but was often applied in vague ways, such as “so-called abstraction.” This and other softened terminological variations formed an ambiguous collection of abstractive terms, like a vague word cloud around the dance concept. This article explores abstraction in Balanchine’s particular ballets, and makes a two-fold argument. On the one hand, by emphasizing the visual aspects of Balanchine’s compositions, we may uncover ways to untangle his dilemma about dance abstraction. Visual theories of “semantic abstraction” by Harold Osborne, and of “the gesture of abstraction” by Blake Stimson, may help us to understand the abstractive modes in several...

Dance Research, 1998

On 29 December 1921, as The Sleeping Princess entered the second month of its run at London's Alhambra Theatre, The Times announced that a plan was afoot to film the ballet. Amazingly, the initiative came from the inveterately anti-populist Diaghilev himself. Impressed by the film version of The Three Musketeers that Walter Wanger was then producing at Covent Garden to music 'synchronised' by conductor Eugene Goosens, Diaghilev had come to the conclusion 'that the same method might be applied to bring about the more general appreciation of classical ballet'. 'It has [also] been suggested,' continued The Times, 'that the film be done "in natural colours in the same way as The Glorious Adventure, the next production to be shown at Covent Garden [and] the first British film of the kind to be carried out in colours. In this way the glories of M. Bakst's costumes would not be lost, and the whole action of the ballet would be materially assisted.'" The scheme, as indicated by a follow-up article, was part of a larger undertaking to 'produce original films built up on original musical scores and on the scores of a number of existing operas'. The artistic side was entrusted to motion picture newcomersthe painters Augustus John and S. H. Sime, who were to 'concern themselves with the settings', and the composerJosef Holbrooke, who was to 'provide much of the music'.2 In other words, the plan was intended to appropriate the 'cheap and rapidly breeding cinema', in T. S. Eliot's words,3 for the purposes of 'high art', the reason Diaghilev would have entertained the idea in the first place.

Common Knowledge, 2014

The Wagnerian term Gesamtkunstwerk, or complete artwork, has repeatedly been used to describe the collaborative work of the Ballet Russes, the company founded by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909. Ballet had long been performed in conjunction with opera, especially French opera.