Becoming Balanchine

The legacy of George Balanchine will be forever entwined with the enduring fiefdoms he established, the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. Yet, as the dance critic and historian Elizabeth Kendall reminds us in Balanchine Finds his America: A Tale of Love Lost and Ballet Reborn, Balanchine, the man, is hardly synonymous with the New York City Ballet. Kendall previously wrote a book about Balanchine’s early years in Imperial Russia and how conditions during the Bolshevik Revolution shaped his life, work, and sexuality. In her follow-up, Balanchine Finds his America, Kendall shines light on Balanchine as a young man, just off the boat from Europe, as he roams from fledgling ballet companies to Broadway and Hollywood and back and on his protracted romantic entanglement with the ballerina-turned-Hollywood starlet Vera Zorina.

George Balanchine in rehearsal for “Danses Concertantes,” featuring Frederic Franklin and Alexandra Danilova, 1944. Photograph by AF Sozio, from Dance Index Feb-March 1945

This was a period of great challenge and growth for the choreographer, from Balanchine’s seminal creation of “Serenade” in 1934 to the premiere of “The Four Temperaments” in 1946. These are the wilderness years before he became the “father of American ballet.”

Departing from biographical conventions, Kendall narrates in present tense, allowing a novelistic vitality to propel the action. Kendall interjects frequently to serve as the reader’s guide, admit to when she is making historical guess work, and ground her assessments in archival research and historical letters that are quoted throughout.

According to Kendall, Balanchine found himself caught between rivalling visions for the soul of American ballet. On the one hand, Sol Hurok, the iron-willed Russian patron behind Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, sought to preserve ballet’s roots as a glamorous European artform. On the other hand, the brooding, Harvard-educated Lincoln Kerstein, who brought Balanchine to America, saw ballet as a potential engine for social commentary and change.

Apart from these two, Kendall notes, the cultural intelligentsia had overlooked ballet in favor of modern dance, which they considered better able to speak to the conditions of the Great Depression. Dance critics like John Martin heaped praise on modern dance choreographers such as Doris Humphreys, Martha Graham, and Hanya Holm. Yet increasing, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, inspired by Segrei Diaghilev's original Ballet Russes, were filling up shows at New York City Center. Hurok's vision to bring the best of old-world ballet to America appeared to be winning.

Around the same time, Kirstein and Balanchine opened the School of American Ballet in 1933. The next year he choreographed “Serenade” for the newly formed American Ballet, which was made up of nascent dancers from the school, to Tchaikovsky’s sweepingly romantic Serenade for Strings in C. The ballet was an inauspicious beginning, getting rained on during its outdoor premiere at a donor’s Westchester estate.

In need of money, by 1936, Balanchine focused his efforts increasingly on Broadway, starting with On Your Toes, the first musical to make extensive use of classical ballet. Kendall shows how Balanchine continued developing his choreographic voice through this more populist avenue, most notably by choreographing his lasting ballet “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.” Balanchine was the first choreographer in Broadway history to be credited as such rather than simply as “dance director.”

Yet Balanchine continued to suffer with bouts of ill-health, stemming from his struggle with tuberculosis in the late 1920s, for which he had been hospitalized. In all likelihood, Kendall speculates, his tuberculosis can be traced to growing up in war-torn St. Petersburg. While he had been recuperating in an isolated sanatorium perched up in the French Alps, Kendall writes that “he encountered the popular quasi-medical assumption that tubercular fevers were linked with an enhanced sex drive.” While hospitalized, Balanchine was encouraged to have affairs, and Kendall links his later sexual activities to a constant fear of the tuberculosis relapsing. Rather than rushing to judgment as is so popular amongst the loud fridges of balletomanes, Kendall seeks to understand this oft-taboo part of Balanchine’s personae.

Vera Zorina, George Balanchine's first wife. Image courtesy of Balanchine Finds his America by Elizabeth Kendall

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George Balanchine. Image courtesy of Balanchine Finds his America by Elizabeth Kendall

While former dancers have attested that Balanchine was not a sexual man in his later years, Kendall argues that Balanchine at this time carried an obsession with his sexual health. She hypothesizes that this partly accounts for his affair with the black dancer Josephine Baker, the Paris sensation who had come to America and starred in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, for which Balanchine choreographed. He took Baker to see George Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, which left an impression, watching, as Kendall puts it, “a Jewish musician’s version of white novelist South Carolinian Dubose Heyward’s depiction of the supposed folk roots of Black life in the slums of Charleston.” Inspired by the subject matter, Balanchine later directed the all-black 1940 Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky, which Vincente Minnelli made into a landmark MGM musical in 1942. Kendall shows how Balanchine soaked in many aspects of American culture.

If there’s one turning point for Balanchine during this time, Kendall posits, it was meeting Zorina. The German-Norwegian dancer had been married to his professional rival, Massine, whom the impresario Colonel de Basil had replaced Balanchine with as Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo’s choreographer in 1933. Now a rising choreographer in America, Balanchine met Zorina while choreographing the Hollywood musical The Goldwyn Follies. As Balanchine choreographed on and romantically pursued Zorina, Kirstein was left alone to shepherd Balanchine’s dancers in New York, forming a summer company, Ballet Caravan, just to keep them employed.

Kendall makes Zorina out to be Balanchine’s Achilles heel, a Nordic femme fatale, during the 1930s, the woman who would lead him away from his calling of ballet and toward the rat race of Broadway and Hollywood. Yet Balanchine saw her not just as a muse but as an intellectual companion, someone with whom he could talk. Despite Zorina not finding him as erotically appealing as Massine, she found that she could confide in him too, at first. The two were married in 1938, as Balanchine began moving from one Broadway show to the next, without a ballet company to call his home.

Returning to ballet, finally, Balanchine toured with American Ballet Caravan to South America in 1941 for a cultural diplomacy trip brokered by Kirstein and Nelson Rockefeller, that Kendall indicates brought Balanchine to his senses. He choreographed “Concerto Barocco” to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D minor for Two Violins, premiering it to acclaim on tour in Rio de Janeiro. The work still serves as a tour de force of his sophisticated musicality and invention. Balanchine seemed back on track.

Ultimately, he and Zorina divorced for good in 1946, and Balancine married a promising young Native American ballerina, Maria Tallchief, later that year.

The School of American Ballet in George Balanchine's “Serenade,” 1934. Photograph by unknown

Around the same time, Kirstein had returned home from war service and founded with Balanchine a new enterprise called Ballet Society, the precursor to New York City Ballet. Originally meant as an all-encompassing intellectual experience for the discerning viewer, important critics and artists of the day became subscribers, eager to see how ballet would fit into the post-war cultural milieu of New York City.

Balanchine responded with his 1946 ballet “The Four Temperaments,” which featured a modernist score by Paul Hindemith. The ballet is based on the medieval idea of four different personality archetypes, melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguinic, and choleric, that are tied to bodily fluids. In “The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine portrayed through pure dance, the pensive Melancholic to the flighty Sanguinic, the stolid Phlegmatic to the aggressive Choleric.

The ballet had its inauspicious premiere at the Central High School of Needle Trades with tacky costumes that Balanchine later discarded in favor of the now-iconic black and white practice clothes. To Kendall, the ballet was the culmination of Balanchine’s early years in America, in which he poured all his heartbreak and elusive romanticism. Kendall also posits that the ballet is something more political, its explosive ensemble ending, dancers whacking their legs and marching toward the audience, recalling armies abroad and the atomic bomb, war, American imperialism, and other preoccupations of the era.

Balanchine, who tended to insist that dance not be subject to such interpretive repainting, might shake his head, but Kendall convincingly indicates that something had indeed shifted for Balanchine since he unveiled “Serenade” in 1934. Kendall writes, “there is much more here than just the choreographer’s idea of the Temperaments’ essences. Woven through this miraculous ballet are jazz hip-thrusts, Lindy-hop moments, hints of jazzmen spinning dancer double-basses, solo males facing hesitation and despair, squads of women making swastikas with their arms, figures as if in wartime being shot and collapsing, armies advancing, planes revving up, helicopter blades turning, an atomic bomb cloud billowing, a new world being born in the tantrums of Choleric.”

The beauty of an abstract work is being able to see the things even the choreographer had not intended. As for Kendall’s own book, it is filled with fresh insight and amusing anecdotes that shine light on Balanchine’s early years in America. Breathless and hard to put down, Kendall's story reveals how Balanchine became “the father of American ballet.”

Robert Steven Mack

Robert Steven Mack is a company artist with City Ballet of San Diego and an award-winning filmmaker. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, Law and Liberty, American Purpose, and Arts Fuse. Robert received his Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University, Bloomington, from which he also holds a BA in History and a BS in Ballet Performance from the Jacobs School of Music.

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The legacy of George Balanchine will be forever entwined with the enduring fiefdoms he established, the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet.