"George Balanchine and the United States" in Humanities

[California]

The January/February 2016 issue of Humanities, the bi-monthly publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has a very nice cover story on Balanchine: "George Balanchine and the United States: An Artist in Love with his Adopted Country" by Peter Tonguette.

Please see links below. When the site condenses the full link, it's changing neh.gov to ngov...

[balletforme]

Is this link correct? I got a domain for sale link

[California]

Is this link correct? I got a domain for sale link

Very strange: Here are links from the NEH site:

http://www.neh.gov/humanities- to the Humanities home page

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/back-issues/vol37/issue1 - to the specific issue

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/januaryfebruary/feature/george-balanchine-and-the-united-states-artist-in-love-his-adopted-country- to the Balanchine article

[sandik]

Thanks for this -- will bookmark for later.

[DanielBenton]

At first reading I thought it was a pretty scattershot approach to GB, but actually for people who do not know much about GB it may pique their interest.

[sandik]

And that's the readership (people who don't know much about GB) for this publication.

[Quiggin]

But wouldn't he have "loved" any country in which he found work and ended up? I think that was the implication of the PBS Balanchine bio. And somehow you don't think of his greatest works, like Agon and The Four Temperaments and Mozartiana, as American ballets.

[Jack Reed]

But he had a lot of good things to say about American dancers and how they reflected their country, didn't he? Their speed comes easily to mind. I think he associated that with America in some of his statements.

But he was very much a person "in the moment" - a "place" in time, and so, I think, very much "in the place" too - where he had who he had and what he had. So maybe those are ballets he would not have made, had they kept him on in the various places he worked before that fateful meeting with Lincoln Kirstein in London in Lady Cunard's kitchen, but are, if only implicitly, American.

I agree, though, that the best art does transcend the time and place of its making (if that's consistent with your view).

[Drew]

But wouldn't he have "loved" any country in which he found work and ended up? I think that was the implication of the PBS Balanchine bio. And somehow you don't think of his greatest works, like Agon and The Four Temperaments and Mozartiana, as American ballets.

Unfortunately I missed the PBS bio and read the older bios a very long time ago. But even if he would have loved any country in which he found work and ended up -- where did he find work and end up? (He did tell Lincoln Kirstein he was keen on coming to the country that had women like Ginger Rogers. And he seems to have supported US cold war opposition to the Soviets.)

I think Balanchine's art would have developed in slightly different ways in different countries and/or under different institutional circumstances, but it would still have been his art no question...Still Agon and The Four Temperaments (score written by another European exile--in this case on the run from Fascism), might have looked somewhat different, though it's impossible to say exactly how or why. Though, actually Four Temperaments would not have happened since it was commissioned under very particular circumstances. Serenade, another one of his greatest works, also reflects something of the distinctive experience in the U.S. working with young dancers etc. That is, the "American" influences on his art may not just be reflected in Western Symphony or Who Cares etc. But, yeah, his art.

Edited to add: Jack Reed and I were typing/posting at same time. I was writing partly in the same spirit.

[Quiggin]

At least one figure in the Four Temperaments comes from Balanchine's work for New Ballet in Soviet Russian – and many other parts, Melancholic on the floor, most likely come out of 1920's Soviet ballet idioms (all the while he was voting for Eisenhower).

Balanchine could possibly be compared to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also had an European career followed by an American career – and who like Balanchine established a school in the US. Mies's buildings for the IIT campus in Chicago (where I went to the design school of another Bauhaus emigre) are not really American – the proportions are closer to what you would see in Germany.

So you might say that the modernism which Mies and Balanchine practiced more European based than American. And praticized in the United States which was a temporary staging ground for much of European culture druing the forties and fifties – think of Adorno, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Mann, deKooing, Albers. And how different it becomes translated into the work of Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Frankernthaler, Cage, Cunningham, Rauchenberg.

Actually I don't think of art transcending its time – Picasso, Braque, Cezanne, Gris are full of the Frenchness of France and Spanishness of Spain – they perhaps turn the time upside down and inside out.

Balanchine's American folksiness was part of a charming mask. And I don't know if speed is Balanchine's most salient – and desireable – characteristic (if it's really a characteristic).

[Jack Reed]

Just adding that the PBS bio Drew missed, broadcast in the American Masters and the Dance in America series at the time, was released, in a lengthened version, on DVD, Kultur D2448, running 156 minutes, vs. the 120 minutes of the broadcast. (Whether you can get your hands on it is another story, but I recommend it.)

[kfw]

Balanchine's American folksiness was part of a charming mask.

You don't think he was really in love with American culture - musicals, Westerns, relative lack of pomposity?

[sandik]

I think that, fundamentally, what Balanchine took from his American experience that influenced his work as a choreographer was a sense of freedom and amplitude. Yes, the work is faster, but it's also broader, looser, larger. Being separated from his origins gave him the opportunity to experiment, to discard some conventions and keep others, to get at what he thought was essential about ballet, and take away the other parts.

Of course his work would have looked different if Diaghilev had lived longer, or if he'd gotten the directorship in Paris, or if he'd stayed in London. But the ways in which it was different for having come to American -- I think that's the important part.

[Jack Reed]

I think that, fundamentally, what Balanchine took from his American experience that influenced his work as a choreographer was a sense of freedom and amplitude. Yes, the work is faster, but it's also broader, looser, larger. Being separated from his origins gave him the opportunity to experiment, to discard some conventions and keep others, to get at what he thought was essential about ballet, and take away the other parts.

Of course his work would have looked different if Diaghilev had lived longer, or if he'd gotten the directorship in Paris, or if he'd stayed in London. But the ways in which it was different for having come to American -- I think that's the important part.

Thanks for laying out more of the virtues coming to America helped Balanchine to develop than I could list at the moment, sandik. But we remember that he was already exploring going this way - in his artistic development, I mean, not in where he would live and work, in the geographic sense - already very early, when he was nearly forcefully "separated from his origins" by getting thrown out of school for his unorthodox (and as we might say, "extracurricular") experiments in choreography. So I'm quibbling about the idea that he took that from American culture - I think he had it in him early, and he took from American culture the opportunities it offered to bring forth what he had within him.

As the story about that meeting in the Cunard's kitchen went, he already had some idea: When Kirstein asked him what he was going to do, his response was, "I'm going to try to get to America, because there's nothing to do here."

(That story is not to be found in Taper's biography, however, where the name "Cunard" doesn't even appear in the index; and I think now it originated with Balanchine. It's in that PBS documentary, at 22:58, where he tells it on camera in front of the NY State Theater.

Taper tells of their third meeting, in the parlor of Kirstein's hotel in London, where Les Ballets 1933 was playing, where Kirstein poured out his dreams and Balanchine said he would like to try: "As far as far as he was concerned, Europe had become a museum; in America he sensed the promise of new possibilities.")

Edited January 9, 2016 by Jack Reed

[Quiggin]

Taper tells of their third meeting, in the parlor of Kirstein's hotel in London, where Les Ballets 1933 was playing, where Kirstein poured out his dreams and Balanchine said he would like to try: "As far as far as he was concerned, Europe had become a museum; in America he sensed the promise of new possibilities.")

In one of Kirstein's memoirs that Taper quotes, Kirstein says that Balanchine is a complete cipher, no one really knows him or what he wants to do. Balanchine the politician was likely saying some of what Kirstein wanted to hear.

Balanchine in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1948 gives the impression he still wants to do traditional European ballet – not Pocahontus and Billy the Kid which are the kinds of American ballets Kirkstein wanted earlier for Ballet Caravan when Balanchine had resigned from Ballet Theatre and School of American Ballet and had gone to Hollywood.

"Ballets he wants to do include a ballet-oratorio by Vittorio Rieti based on verses by Lorenzo di Medici, a ballet by a new composer dalla Popula, and Alexis Haieff’s Beauty and the Beast:, a long ballet in three acts of at least an hour’s duration. Full length ballets intrigue Balanchine. 'Long works like ‘La Belle au Bois Dormant’ will come back into favor again–but first we must have the theaters for them,' he says wistfully."

Didn't Balanchine audition for the Danish Ballet in the thirties and wasn't there a possiblity that he would have been head of the Paris Opera Ballet if Lifar hadn't returned? It woud seem he could really fit himself in any situation that allowed him to work during that darkening period. (Stravinsky was scrambling for a job in Germany of all places.)

And again part of Balanchine's Americaness was fashioned get press coverage in Life magazine and Time. But the ballets were Franco-Russe under the hood and School of American Ballet classes were taught by Russian masters.

I agree with Sandik about amplitude and [spatial] freedom. And I guess you can see the differences between Palais de Cristal and Symphony in C, but Pallais has all sorts of the wonderful concertante movements with soloists, demis and corps playing wittily against each other – and isn't that more than enough Balanchine?

[dirac]

Didn't Balanchine audition for the Danish Ballet in the thirties and wasn't there a possiblity that he would have been head of the Paris Opera Ballet if Lifar hadn't returned? It woud seem he could really fit himself in any situation that allowed him to work during that darkening period. (Stravinsky was scrambling for a job in Germany of all places.)

If Lifar hadn’t returned -- and elbowed him out of the job. From what I have read I think Balanchine would have loved to lead the Opera and if he had won the position probably only something like drastic wartime conditions would have led him to consider emigrating to the States and uncertain prospects there. Certainly some of his ballets would probably look different (and others would not have been made), but as Drew notes we can’t really say how they would look different. He loved his adopted country and was grateful for the new start it offered (and his adopted country should be at least as grateful to him), but his first goal wasn’t America but finding a place to make ballets, and I expect he would happily have found that place in Europe as well as the U.S.

It was a time when people did find themselves in unexpected places. I think of Schrodinger, who wound up in Ireland at the behest of math geek Eamon de Valera.

[Jack Reed]

… I think Balanchine would have loved to lead the Opera and if he had won the position probably only something like drastic wartime conditions would have led him to consider emigrating to the States and uncertain prospects there. ...

That rouses my habitual skepticism, in the light of Balanchine's rough time in Paris making Palais, although that was over ten years later.

… He loved his adopted country and was grateful for the new start it offered (and his adopted country should be at least as grateful to him), but his first goal wasn’t America but finding a place to make ballets, and I expect he would happily have found that place in Europe as well as the U.S.

...

That is the core of the matter.

Except, that place was not to be found in Europe, but in our "land of opportunity". (Sometimes stereotypes hold some truth.)

The quote from the Balanchine documentary in my edited post above comes just after we are told about his firing from new ballet ventures - in Paris and in Monte Carlo - twice in two years! They wanted older ballets - from Diaghilev's seasons! From London to Paris to Monte Carlo and back to London, where his and Edward James's "Les Ballets 1933" ran just twenty performances.

As in his student days, his drive to experiment and innovate put him at odds with the tastes of the established powers. But in London he met Kirstein, who, as I see it, certainly had ideas for his American ballet, using American themes, but also had the intelligence to realize who he had in Balanchine and, usually, gave Balanchine the freedom he needed.

[dirac]

That rouses my habitual skepticism, in the light of Balanchine's rough time in Paris making Palais, although that was over ten years later.

That is the core of the matter.

Except, that place was not to be found in Europe, but in our "land of opportunity". (Sometimes stereotypes hold some truth.)

I'm not sure that later experience really says much about how Balanchine was considering his options earlier, or how things might have turned out if he had stayed in Paris. However, it's probably just as well he wasn't around for the Occupation, although I like to think he would have left, thus possibly ending up in the U.S. anyway.

I doubt America was anything like Balanchine's first choice. Balanchine's ideas weren't exactly what Kirstein had in mind either, so it may be that both men thought they were settling for something other than what they wished for, and it all ended better than anyone could have imagined. And it took some time for Balanchine to get really established, and accepted, in the US.

[Swanilda8]

I can't believe the article didn't mention Balanchine's experiences working with black dancers in the US - particularly the Nicholas Brothers and Katherine Dunham. To me, that seems to be one of the clearest ways in which traveling to the United States affected his choreography. There's excellent - and broadly accepted - scholarship on the fact that his collaborations with those artists impacted his choreography (and vice versa).