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At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth many thought that ballet was in crisis. An opposition could be observed between the "old" classical ballet and the "new" ballet, represented in the first place by Michel Fokine and Alexander Gorskii. In books and magazines critics discussed what should happen to Russian ballet in the future. Many of these predictions were later fulfilled. The critics managed to "foresee" the advent of abstract ballet (pioneered by George Balanchine), the epoch of so-called "dramballet", and the gradual independence of character dance in 1930–1940. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ballet Orpheus (1948), choreographed by George Balanchine, and the cultural milieu of queerness surrounding the ballet's creation. Although Orpheus is known for helping to formally establish the New York City Ballet, the undercurrents of homosexuality in the ballet's development have received less attention in the historical narrative. Additionally, the dancer Nicholas Magallanes, a gay Mexican American immigrant who starred in the title role, is similarly overlooked. Thus, through choreographic analysis and archival research, I elucidate the collective influence of a constellation of queer men to assert that the significance of Orpheus lies in its queer past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the most perplexingly antagonistic comments about the differences between modern dance and ballet can be found strewn throughout the works of two pioneering twentieth-century American dance writers: John Martin (1893–1985) –  The New York Times's first permanent dance critic, champion of modern dancers and early supporter of Martha Graham (Kisselgoff et al. 1988: 44) – and Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996), the prodigious author, impresario, and balletomane, who cofounded with George Balanchine the New York City Ballet. Looming behind a significant number of Martin's and Kirstein's appraisals and condemnations of modern dance and ballet are Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetics, particularly his Apollonian-Dionysian conceptualisations. This essay investigates the reception of Nietzsche in the context of the 1930s writing of these two dance critics, particularly in respect to their treatment of gender. Foundational for this essay's development are the analyses of Nietzsche's reception by earlier twentieth-century dance figures in the works of Susan Jones (2013, 2010), Susan Manning (2006) and Kimerer LaMothe (2006). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The choreography of George Balanchine has long been described as "musical." By applying music-analytic tools to patterns in dance, this essay analyzes relationships between dance and music in Balanchine's Concerto Barocco, set to J. S. Bach's Concerto for Two Violins (BWV 1043). Choreomusical notation and annotated videos offer readers the chance to sketch-dance, to feel in their own bodies the movements in relation to the music. Balanchine's choreography maps both specific patterns of pitch and rhythm from Bach's score--sometimes synchronized to the music and sometimes displaced tempo-rally--and general patterns of motivic development and metric manipulation. Balanchine's use of funky rhythms resonates with his characteristic on-top-of-the-beat step timing, offbeat visual accentuation, and jazz-dance-inspired movements, attesting to the adoption of both Africanist and Europeanist musical techniques in the formation of an American neoclassical ballet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ivanov's Nutcracker premiered in 1892 and since then, many choreographers have made their own versions of the work. This article examines two key productions in which Trepak, one of the act 2 divertissements, has remained largely unchanged—Willam Christensen's 1944 version for San Francisco Ballet and George Balanchine's 1958 version for CBS—and addresses the historical frameworks: namely, the impact of Russian Imperialism, World War II, and the Cold War that shaped them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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 of Balanchine’s black-and-white ballets. On the other hand, whether discussed or not, Balanchine’s abstractive gestures have created powerful representational shifts in some cases. In particular, by examining the interracially cast duet from the ballet Agon (1957) as a visual case study, we may see how Balanchine’s rejections of the concept, amplified by critics’ vague terminological invocations of, or silence about, abstractive choreographic gestures, occluded the work’s participation in the discourse of abstraction. Simultaneously, unnoticed yet potent choreographic gestures of semantic abstraction may have promoted whiteness as a normative structure, one that relies on a hegemonic “bodily integrity” (as discussed by Saidiya Hartman). Such an analysis leads to a recognition that Balanchine’s abstraction could have been a subversive form of dissent similar to Kobena Mercer’s concept of “discrepant abstraction.” However, I posit that, as a result of the Balanchine dilemma and its influence, the interlinked gestures of an abstract nature that have not been recognized as such promoted the self-regulative structure identified by Bojana Cvejić as “white harmony.” Ultimately, a more specific and clear application of the term “abstract” in ballet is needed, as it can help to dismantle or disrupt the system of white supremacy operative in dominant ballet structures.

This article uncovers an unrealized "Bach Ballet" by choreographer George Balanchine previously unexamined by scholars of music or dance. Inspired by tap dancer Paul Draper and conceived of by Balanchine's patron Lincoln Kirstein, this work is probably an early inspiration for the choreographer's now iconic ballet Concerto Barocco (1941, set to J. S. Bach's D-minor concerto for two violins, BWV 1043). This "Bach Ballet" provides an occasion to reevaluate the aesthetic and institutional stakes of Balanchine's better-known endeavor from the same period: his well-regarded dances for Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's musical comedy On Your Toes, in which the worlds of classical music and ballet collide with popular music and dance. New insights into the dramaturgical function and reception of the dances in On Your Toes offer a way to revisit the show's status as an early exemplar of "integrated" musical comedy and to understand the musical's engagement with the phenomenon of Russian ballet in New Deal America. This essay analyzes the musical's three dances--the Princess Zenobia ballet, the "On Your Toes" number, and the concluding Slaughter on Tenth Avenue--as an allegory of Balanchine's Americanization as a choreographer. This complex of projects provides a fresh perspective on how Balanchine's personal contact with a range of dancers (white and African-American, tap and ballet performers) affected his development as a choreographer and in the process helped realize, if inadvertently, the erstwhile goal of Balanchine and Kirstein's ballet enterprise: to reinvent the art form in a native idiom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The choreographer George Balanchine famously declared that "I don't create or invent anything, I assemble." I take the import of this pronouncement to be that he conceived his artistic mission to be that of articulating (in movement) those liberatory tendencies that, without his work, might very well have remained inchoate for his audience, and I illustrate this reading through an examination of his 1957 masterpiece Agon, a ballet whose central pas de deux is a symbolic violation of the laws against miscegenation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of dancers’ relationships with their noncharacter solo roles in leotard ballets by George Balanchine and William Forsythe reveals a dynamic cluster of flexible and multifaceted conceptualisations. Performers’ process includes a range of abstract images, nonfictional and docufictional ideas, metaphoric allusions and storyboarding constructions. Drawing upon Michael Kirby’s concept of non-matrixed performing (1987), as well as on ideas from dance aesthetics, narratology, theatre and film theories, noncharacter roles are understood as partly flexible, diverse performing frameworks that contain ambiguity but do not promote characterisation. The findings suggest that the dissolution of character traits in plotless choreography often serves as a catalyst for the performers’ polyvalent expressions of their artistic identities, value systems and agency. Observation of performances, in conjunction with direct interviews with expert dancers from several international ballet companies, brings to light the links between the performer’s ideas and the effects observable in the dance. Attention to the performers’ approaches and aspects of the work which they wish to emphasise reveals less observed aspects of dance texts and illuminates the nature of the ballet dancer’s qualitative contribution in non-narrative choreography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the links between Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and the avant-garde in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bronislava Nijinska spent the last thirty-two years of her life in Southern California. Beginning with her first visit to Hollywood in 1934 to choreograph the dances in A Midsummer Night's Dream, this essay examines her activities in California both as a teacher and a choreographer. It looks closely at her Hollywood bowl season of 1940, when she staged three of her ballets, all new to the United States; the dancers she trained who went on to distinguished professional careers, and her approach to teaching. It briefly summarizes her activities in the 1940s, when she choreographed for Ballet Theatre, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and Ballet International; the 1950s, when she worked for the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas; and the 1960s, when the revival of Les Noces and Les Biches by the Royal Ballet brought her most celebrated works back into repertory. Finally, it speculates on the reasons she settled in California, given the limited opportunities it offered her for creative work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This current volume of Experiment, Volume 20, entitled "Kinetic Los Angeles: Russian Émigrés in the City of Self-Transformation" (Guest Editor, Lorin Johnson) is dedicated to the contributions of Russian artists who lived and worked in Los Angeles in the fields of dance performance, visual arts, and film, exploring how the city was influenced by their presence as well as the reasons that drew them to Southern California. While many of the essays focus on the émigré community that gathered in Los Angeles during the 1930S-1940S, the investigation of "Russianness" in the city is not confined to those decades. Each essay in this volume is accompanied by photographs and illustrations which help to tell this story, many of which are previously unpublished and recently discovered in private collections and archives in the u.s. and abroad. Contributors include: Kenneth Archer, John Bowlt, Donald Bradbum, Elizabeth Durst, Lynn Garafola, Karen Goodman, Millicent Hodson, Lorin Johnson (Guest Editor), Mark Konecny, Debra Levine and Oleg Minin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1925 George Balanchine joined the Ballets Russes, the ballet company directed by Sergei Diaghilev, when he was just twenty years old. Many of the elements of his mature art can be traced to his time with the mesmerizing Diaghilev, who controlled virtually every aspect of his troupe's activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insights into the musical origins of Stravinsky's Apollo are discerned in part by applying he principles of versification to phrase structure throughout the work, but most especially in the music that accompanies the "birth of Apollo" and the "Pas de deux" as danced by Apollo and Terpsichore. In keeping with his understanding of classical ballet, Stravinsky endeavored to create a diatonic framework at the surface level. Nevertheless, vestiges of his Russian past are evident at deeper levels of his compositional process. It is as though Stravinsky was using the Greek masks of Greek antiquity to serve as filters for his Russian thumbprint that we associate with his earlier works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During Worl War I and the postwar period, the Ballets Russes bacame a truly international company, forced to absorb and adapt to the very latest trends in contemporary Western culture. This article describes the challenges facing dancers in the post-war period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 of Balanchine's black-and-white ballets. On the other hand, whether discussed or not, Balanchine's abstractive gestures have created powerful representational shifts in some cases. In particular, by examining the interracially cast duet from the ballet Agon (1957) as a visual case study, we may see how Balanchine's rejections of the concept, amplified by critics' vague terminological invocations of, or silence about, abstractive choreographic gestures, occluded the work's participation in the discourse of abstraction. Simultaneously, unnoticed yet potent choreographic gestures of semantic abstraction may have promoted whiteness as a normative structure, one that relies on a hegemonic "bodily integrity" (as discussed by Saidiya Hartman). Such an analysis leads to a recognition that Balanchine's abstraction could have been a subversive form of dissent similar to Kobena Mercer's concept of "discrepant abstraction." However, I posit that, as a result of the Balanchine dilemma and its influence, the interlinked gestures of an abstract nature that have not been recognized as such promoted the self-regulative structure identified by Bojana Cvejić as "white harmony." Ultimately, a more specific and clear application of the term "abstract" in ballet is needed, as it can help to dismantle or disrupt the system of white supremacy operative in dominant ballet structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]