Abstract
In the 1930s and 1940s, dance critics in the United States turned their attention to defining a truly “American” ballet. On of the most ardent voices on the matter was New York Times dance critic John Martin. Martins preoccupation with this issue had been building for several years, and echoed similar concerns in theatre and literature circles of how to create a unique and original American aesthetic. But the debate in the ballet world was intensified when dance impresario and critic Lincoln Kirstein brought George Balanchine to the United States in 1933 to form an American ballet. Martin originally heralded Balanchine’s arrival, but before long, he was issuing the pair mixed sentiments of “welcome” and “warning” about how to effectively create a national ballet.2
The American style will not imitate the Russian, but instead be its equivalent for our time and place. Our legitimate reflection of a Democracy is of necessity not distant, but immediately intimate. There is pride in both styles, the awareness of the human body in all of its super-human released essential energy. I leave with my readers the choice of future style in the dance. The choice ultimately depends among other things on which political or economic system has the best bet in America.
Kirstein, Ballet1
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Notes
Lincoln Kirstein, Ballet: Bias and Belief. Three Pamphlets Collected and Other Dance Writings of Lincoln Kirstein, comp. Nancy Reynolds (New York: Dance Horizons, 1983), 200.
John Martin, “New Company: An Open Letter of Greeting to the American Ballet,” New York Times (December 16, 1934), X8.
Martin, “At the Opera,” New York Times (August 18, 1935), X5.
Lincoln Kirstein, “A Letter,” New York Times (August 25, 1935), X5.
Lynn Garafola, “Heterodoxical Pasts,” in Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 391.
Ruth Page, Page by Page, ed. Andrew Mark Wentink (Brooklyn, NY: Dance Horizons, 1978), 99.
Martin, “Native Blend,” New York Times (March 8, 1936), X8.
Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1940), 140.
Martin, “In Need of Trained Audiences: Intelligent Appreciation Required for a Growing Art,” New York Times (November 11, 1928), 145.
Martin, “New Ballets,” New York Times (May 2, 1937), 175.
Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 113.
Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 388.
Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 21.
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 35.
Martin, “Creating an American Ballet,” New York Times (May 4, 1930), X9.
George Amberg, Ballet in America: The Emergence of an American Art (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), 127.
Arnold Haskell, “Introduction and Commentary” in Ballet Panorama by Baron (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1954), 181.
R. P. Blackmur, “The Swan in Zurich,” in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, eds., What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 357–358.
Allen Hughes, “Every Style Known to Man,” New York Times (April 19, 1964), SMA73.
Clive Barnes, “Balanchine: Two Images,” New York Times (January 21, 1968), 18.
Anna Kisselgoff, “The Vision is European,” New York Times (November 28, 1982), H16.
Deborah Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 274.
For an account of ballet in the United States in the nineteenth century, see Barbara Barker, Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli and Guiseppina Morlacchi (New York: Dance Horizons, 1984).
Quoted in Bernard Taper, Balanchine (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 290.
Quoted in Godfrey Hodgson, “The Ideology of the Liberal Consensus,” in William H. Chafe and Harvard Sitkoff, eds., A History of Our Time: Readings on Postwar America, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114.
While I demonstrate here that Balanchine’s abstract ballets became the dominant definition of American ballet from the 1950s through the twentieth century, it must be made clear that the critical discourse that establishes it as such only partially represents Balanchine’s work. The canonization of high modernist ballet as American occludes a good deal of other styles of ballet choreography that continued through the century; moreover, Balanchine was an extremely diverse choreographer and the plotless, abstract ballets make up only one part of his total repertory. Yet, as Garafola notes, his name today is “synonymous with neoclassicism,” often eclipsing the broader scope of his corpus (Lynn, Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes [New York: DaCapo Press, 1998], 135).
Dance historian Tim Scholl refers to these ballets as Balanchine’s “American period” in his From Petipa to Balanchine: Classical Revival and the Modernization of ‘Ballet’ (London: Routledge, 1994), 116.
Bernard Taper, Balanchine (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 226.
Lincoln Kirstein, Movement and Metaphor: Four Centuries of Ballet (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1984), 242.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1949), vii, ix.
Quoted in Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 76.
Quoted in Richard Buckle, George Balanchine: Ballet Master (New York: Random House, 1988), 181.
Suki Schorer, Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 24.
Quoted in Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1998), 194.
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© 2007 William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
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Harris, A. (2007). Choreographing America: Redefining American Ballet in the Age of Consensus. In: Demastes, W.W., Fischer, I.S. (eds) Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_9
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