Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze was born the second of three children to Meliton Balanchivadze and his wife Marie on January 22,1904 in the village of Banodzha in western Georgia. His older sister was named Tamara and his younger brother, Andrei. Georgi was a very reserved child and never showed his emotions. When he was punished he would hide, afraid someone would see him crying.

When translated, balanchivadze means "jester's son", which always amused Balanchine because his father was a singer and composer, and his mother was a pianist who encouraged the musical development of her children. When Meliton was home from his many tours and study trips he would teach the children to sing, and all three of them took piano lessons. At parties Andrei and Tamara would often dance for the guests but Georgi refused because he hated anything to do with dance and performance.

When she reached the official age for admittance to the Maryinsky School of Ballet, Tamara was taken by her mother to audition. The ten year old Georgi was taken along as well, but with no intentions of auditioning. While waiting though, an acquaintance of the family suggested it would do no harm if Georgi auditioned since he was there. He was accepted and Tamara was not. After some initial homesickness Georgi loved the school and thrived in its atmosphere.

In addition to developing his kinesthetic proficiency, he had retained his musical gift and Vera Kostrovitskaya, a fellow student, said that "He could never pass with indifference any musical instrument. The minute he came down to our floor of the school the sounds of a piano would be heard...Sometimes, in the evening, we would secretly climb the stairs to listen to Balanchivadze playing Liszt, Chopin or Beethoven in the boy's quarters..." In 1919 Balanchivadze applied to the Conservatory of Music and was accepted, but as an undernourished dancer (this was during the Bolshevik revolution and everyone was hungry, especially those involved in the arts, which were considered to be counter-revolutionary) he could not work simultaneously at the school and the conservatory, and never completed his music course. There can be little doubt that his concentration on both dance and music was the foundation of his later excellence in choreography.

In 1920, at the age of 16, Balanchivadze arranged a dance for the annual school performance. He choreographed the pas de deux "La Nuit" to music by Anton Rubenstein (Mikhail Barishnikov claims that this ballet is still performed in Russia today). It was presented in the little theater in the school and was well received by the students, though the faculty opinion tended to be disapproving. The principal violation was having the female dancing on pointe while costumed in a tunic, which broke the rule (i.e., custom and usage) that pointe work was reserved for dancers wearing the classic tutu. Another ballet, "A Poem", featuring his classmate Alexandra Danilova and himself was even more daring. He entered with Danilova lying across his shoulders and arms. This was thought to be going too far altogether. Overstepping the bounds of costuming could be tolerated, but the voluptuousness of draping a girl across the body was beyond permissible. In the tradition of the imperial ballet contact between male and female was confined to the waist, when the male would support his partner in turns; to one hand when he would lead her around in a promenade; or to the man's shoulder where she might pose her hands while lightly maintaining balance. It was unheard of to hang a woman over your shoulders. It wasn't done, it wasn't proper, in fact it was obscene and shocking. So from the beginning, Balanchine succeeded in disturbing an audience. He graduated in 1921 and was taken into the corps de ballet of the Maryinsky Company.

In the summer of 1921 he saw a concert by Kasayan Goleizovsky's Chamber Ballet that was "thoroughly unconventional and profoundly provocative". Goleizovsky's odd, acrobatic choreography full of dancers tied into knots and led into and out of mazes formed by their arms and legs influenced him greatly. Goleizovsky's presentation was the embodiment of the two constant sources of Balanchivadze's choreographic objective: good music, and the human form lightly clad and reshaped in a new gymnastic or acrobatic manner.

Fyodor Lopoukhov, a principal choreographer of the State Theater and one of the few who rebelled influenced Balanchivadze as well with his chains of linked dancers. It was Fokine, however who made the deepest impression on Balanchivadze. He had enlarged upon the essentially passive role of the corps de ballet to make its members an active part of the ensemble. Thus, the corps was not a decorative fringe around the principal dancers, but a sensitive group that reshaped itself in response to the movements of the principals, so that it too became a contributing "character" to the development of the ballet. The brilliant handling of groups of dancers was to emerge as one of the dominant traits of Balanchine's style.

Mikhail Mikhailov, a fellow student of Balanchivadze's in school wrote years later of the intense urge that he and the other young students around Balanchivadze had to create and stage something new. Balanchivadze had been choreographing solos and adagios as well as incidental variety pieces, but Vladimir Dmitriev, ex-soldier and friend of Mikhailov, thought something more was needed and suggested to the young students that they form a group around Balanchivadze. Mikhailov joined, as did the critic Yuri Slonimsky, Leonid Lavrosky, later the balletmaster of the Bolshoi, Olga Mungalova, Nina Mlodzinska, Piotr Gusev, Alexandra Danilova, and Lydia Ivanova, Balanchivadze's frequent partner in school productions; they were among the first in a group of a dozen. Balanchivadze became chief choreographer by virtue of his intense proficiency and prolificacy - he no sooner completed one ballet than he was preparing to work on another. He began a series of presentations with this group he called Evenings of the Young Ballet. The Young Ballet was not a company in the ordinary sense of a regular performing ensemble with regular seasons and a stable personnel roster. It was an informal group, constantly changing and performing when and wherever the opportunity arose. Piotr Gusev once sternly asked the group what their credo was and the assembled friends chorused that they would do anything Balanchivadze wanted. It existed as an outlet for Balanchivadze, whose quiet determination won the respect of artists of his own age and earned him the disapproval of the directors of the Maryinsky Company. The Young Ballet's first performance in 1923 had an obvious influence of Goleizovsky, and some also detected a trace of Lopoukhov and Fokine.

By the age of 18, Balanchivadze, trained in the classical discipline of Petipa (considered to be the master of Russian ballet at the time) and in the more poetic classicism of Ivanov (another master of the time), had been exposed to the influences of the sensuous, iconoclastic Goleizovsky, and to Lopoukhov, who used to say that dance could express everything with the help of music alone and who dared to turn a Beethoven symphony into a ballet.

In 1924 Vladimir Dmitriev's project on presenting abroad a small group of artists called the Soviet Dancers was approved, presumably with the intention of displaying the latest achievements of Soviet culture to the Far East and Western Europe. The contract was signed by the dancers Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Zheverzheyeva, Lydia Ivanova, Boris Efimov and Balanchivadze; the "management": Dmitriev, G.D. Nebliubim and E.D. Olkovsky; a pianist and singer, and others. Within the next few weeks the Far East was forgotten, the singer and pianist dispensed with, Nebliubim and Olkovsky dropped out and it was agreed that the dancer's tour should be confined to Germany. Then Lydia Ivanova was killed in a suspicious boating accident. The remainder of the troupe sailed for Settin, a port in Germany, sometime in the second half of June. They reached Berlin by railroad trip but once there, found that no real tour had been set up properly. Then came a telegram ordering them to return to Russia immediately. Dmitriev and the dancers stayed, but everyone else returned. They had little money, no tour, an uncertain future, and only Zheverzheyeva among them could speak German. The group all agreed to defect in Weisbaden, where Dmitriev had drawn up a contract extending their stay.

They traveled throughout Europe looking for places to perform and eventually settled temporarily in London. They experienced great difficulties with acceptance in Britain though, and soon left for Paris which was more receptive towards Soviet performers. While trying their luck there, almost out of money and hope, they received a call from the impressario Serge Diaghilev for an "audition". They had heard of Diaghilev and his troupe, but thought prospects of meeting him were slim. They auditioned for him at a friend of his studio, where Georgi and Zheverzheyeva showed Diaghilev Balanchivadze's Scriabin pas de deux and Danilova danced a few steps of "the Firebird". Since one of Diaghilev's commitments to the Opera de Monte Carlo was to supply dancers for its opera season between January and April, he asked Georgi, "Can you make ballets for operas?" "Yes", he replied at once, not knowing whether he could or not. "Can you do them quickly?" "Yes."

Diaghilev took the rag-tag group on and paid them according to their rank in the corps. Danilova was paid the most out of the dancers, and Balanchivadze would have been paid the least because he had just recently joined the world of professional ballet, barely past entry level, but because of he was to choreograph in addition to danceing, his pay was the highest of the five. The choreographic skills that had set him back in the Soviet Union provided him with a step up in the Western world. It was a small thing at first, but a pattern had been set. The Diaghilev company featured creativity and had done so from its very beginning; here Balanchivadze would be encouraged, not discouraged.

Balanchivadze was twenty, energetic, provincial, and awesomely gifted. He easily answered in affirmation when asked if he were quick. Between 1920 and 1924 he had created thirty ballets, designed movement sequences in three plays and one opera, and had tossed off a handful of pieces d'occasion for cabaret presentation. All that while he was performing regularly at the Maryinsky and studying at the Conservatory. He was just starting his first year with Diaghilev, and before it was over he would create one ballet, a dozen opera ballets, and four occasional concert pieces. Balanchine was renowned in later years for his ability to work at high speed and to carry on several jobs for different companies simultaneously. When he was just twenty he already showed signs of the same talent.

Diaghilev, who usually Russianized his English dancers' names, liked to simplify any Russian ones that Westerners might have trouble pronouncing. Nijhinsky had become Nijinsky, Miassin had become Massine, Spessivtseva had become Spessiva. On Monday, December 22, 1924 Georgi Balanchivadze became George Balanchine. It was during Balanchine's second season in London with Diaghilev, in 1926, that he finally gained renown for his work with "The Triumph of Neptune". This was Balanchine's first work to show American influence, and it was also his last display of virtuoso dancing, for he developed trouble with his knee, had a piece of cartilage removed and was never so agile again. "Apollon Musagete" (later shortened to simply "Apollo"), choreographed and performed in 1928, was a landmark in Balanchine's career. Stravinsky was the composer and conductor of the symphony for the ballet. The choreography for Apollon had extended the language of classical dance to include gestural expressiveness, novel lifts, poses and balances. It held in it the seeds of many later works. The ballet looks forward to the new, the "neoclassicism", which would be the choreographer's gift to America.

For the duration of the time he was with Diaghilev, Balanchine worked with the dancers Diaghilev chose, as he did with the music Diaghilev commissioned and the librettos that were passed along. Despite such difficulties, the opportunities were vast. Balanchine was working steadily with intelligent encouragement and his work was being made known throughout Europe. Until he had come to Diaghilev no one knew who he was. By the time he was cast adrift everyone in the world of ballet knew him, as did several discerning members of the world of variety entertainment. He had a reputation, and though he had choreographed thirty ballets in Russia, with "Apollon Musagete" he had found his own true artistic identity. Diaghilev had served him well, as he had Diaghilev.

The highly successful "Prodigal Son" that Balanchine did was his last ballet for Diaghilev's company, and the last performance the company ever did. For three months after its premier, on August 19, 1929 Diaghilev died and his company scattered to the winds. The years with Diaghilev had been of great use to him in a number of ways. Although he was not vitally interested in performing, he had appeared in a wide variety of ballets and grew to know the work of Fokine, Massine and Nijinska intimately. He had received a compact education of twentieth-century ballet in a brief five years. Balanchine used to express his gratitude for what Diaghilev had done for him and the possibilities he had opened up because this was courteous and also what the writers and journalists expected to hear. Yet, it was not "because of Diaghilev" that Balanchine came to make his finest ballets the way that he made them, or that he made them acceptable without decor and with a minimum of costume. It was music, not painting, that filled his mind, guiding his brain and hands. Balanchine acknowledged his debt to the impressario, and acknowledged it with grace, but when asked by McNeil Lowry in 1979 what artists in any field had helped to shape his life, he reacted with a doubtful "Ummm".

During the Diaghilev years Balanchine went through an artistic transformation. To free himself of the restrictive regulations of the imperial theaters he had systematically sought movements and gestures that went deliberately against the grace and style of Petipa's dancers. His training in the Maryinsky School had impressed itself thoroughly on him though, and when the time came he knew the classical vocabulary intimately. The tradition of the imperial school was a living thing that could adapt to the changing esthetic climate. Balanchine had developed enormously since he left Russia, but for the moment he was a choreographer without a company for which to choreograph. He did not want to imitate the style of the older productions, but to extend and modify tradition so that it spoke directly to a newer generation. He had no desire to be a choreographic curator of museum pieces endlessly repeating past successes.

Balanchine had been thoroughly steeped in the tradition of the Maryinsky ballet - a style that Pushkin described as "soul inspired flight" - but as a choreographer he found that the Maryinsky style was stifling creatively. There was no room for the creative expressiveness he felt was necessary. Romantic excess in choreography as well as in the music of the composers such as Scriabin, Chopin and Rubenstein attracted him. The degree to which his instincts were truly reflective of his time was demonstrated by the readiness of dancers and choreographers to adapt his new acrobatic innovations to their own. One of these moves was the overhead lift of the female at full arm's length. It was a brazenly daring move that seemed to imperil what had been upheld as the "chasteness" of the female. In another ballet, to express anguish a woman opened her mouth in a silent scream. Then, too, there was the notorious leap across the female's torso arching upward from the stage. He also included splits and gestural innovations, loosely called "duncanesque" after modern dancer Isadora Duncan, for the arms, sinuously liberated from the classically determined positions as can be found in Duncan's choreography. Within two or three years these startling changes became accepted as part of the dance vocabulary, so much so in fact, that it hardly seems possible that they were introduced so recently. The big overhead lift is practically a trademark of contemporary Russian ballet companies.

The four years following Diaghilev's death were spent by Balanchine exercising his choreographic talent under diverse circumstances, and marked his withdrawal from the stage as a dancer. An early failure in English variety was replaced by success in London as a choreographer for showmen Charles Cochran and Oswald Stoll. He was also invited to Copenhagen where he staged ballets for the Royal Danish Ballet. A White Russian, Vassili de Basil, and Rene Blum, an enthusiastic follower of Diaghilev's company, organized the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1932 and invited Balanchine to be its resident choreographer. Under one management or another, the Ballet Russe Company dominated the ballet scene throughout the world for the next decade. However, Balanchine very briefly had charge of his own company, Les Ballets 1933, through the patronage of Edward James. The group was organized around the talents of Tilly Losch, James's wife, and Balanchine was the chief choreographer. He prepared a half-dozen new ballets, which strikingly displayed the theatrical talents of Losch. The company name accurately described Balanchine's feelings about the here and now - it was named after the year in which it flourished. Unfortunately for its collaborators, it flourished very briefly, having only one short season in Paris followed by an equally brief appearance in London before it foundered. The collapse marked the end of Balanchine's residence in Europe.

While in London, on July 7, 1933 Balanchine was introduced to Lincoln Kirstein, a 26 year old American looking to bring classical ballet to his post depression country. He foresaw a school that would train and graduate students into a company and thus would establish a firm base for any performing ensemble. Balanchine accepted Kirstein's offer to head the school, but insisted that Dmitriev, who had arranged for his escape from Russia, and Pierre Vladimirov be included. The later would be a teacher for the school and Dmitriev would be an administrator. Risky though it was, the step made sense. As Balanchine commented bluntly later on, "I left Russia and they didn't want me in France or England." There was one substantial attraction, however, and that was the possibility of working with young, athletic women of the Ginger Rogers mold, a dancer Balanchine had admired in movies.

Kirstein had planned to house the school in Hartford, Connecticut, under the sponsoring shelter of the Wadsworth Antheum, whose director A. Everett Austin offered them an artistic base. Balanchine tried but couldn't work satisfactorily outside New York without the possibility of an adult company, and plans were made to make that the home of the school. Kirstein and Dmitriev found the right sight for the school, at 637 Madison Avenue in New York. They also signed the papers to establish The American Ballet Inc., for which they hoped the school would supply dancers. The school and the company were to be two separate entities: students would pay to work under Balanchine in the former, but they would presumably have contracts and salaries to dance with the later.

On January 2, 1934 the School of American Ballet opened and classes began with a handful of students, none of whom looked like Ginger Rogers; for the most part they were built as sturdily as channel swimmers. Balanchine began to teach, and in a few months started working on a new ballet as if he had the most wonderful company in the world. For all practical purposes, the native American style of movement began to find its form in this first ballet performed by Balanchine's new troupe, "Serenade". In this ballet he incorportated "the masses", making the corps de ballet an integral part of the performance. As a choreographer, Balanchine now had at least the beginnings of what he needed - his own company. The five years since Diaghilev had died provided fitful opportunities for him to work. The remainder of the decade, although episodic in terms of performing opportunities, at least left him charge of the artistic direction of his company. He might not have had the chance to work as intensively as he would have wished, but he could do the ballets that he felt were needed, and do them on something resembling a sustained basis. The transitory nature of Les Ballets 1933 was not entirely behind him, but he had found his future home. In 1935 the American Ballet was invited by the administration of the Metropolitan Opera House to take up residence there. Balanchine agreed to prepare opera ballets for the productions that required them, and his company could mount occasional evenings of their own. The situation appeared to be ideal. In a way, it replicated Diaghilev's relationship with the Monte Carlo Opera, providing the company with a home and giving it the opportunity to mount its own productions as well and tour in the summer months when the opera was closed.

Day to day conditions in the opera house were difficult, however. Rehearsal time and space were limited, dressingrooms were dank, and all-ballet evenings were not really wanted or encouraged. Balanchine worked diligently, doing more than a dozen opera ballets and a handful of works of his own, but there was persistent muttering from critics and the more conservative members of the opera audience about his departure from the strict classical style. Two of Balanchine's works were absolutely despised, to the point where one was closed after its second performance. The relationship between the company and the administration worsened, however, and finally ruptured. The American Ballet departed and the Metropolitan Opera House returned to its more traditional presentations of opera ballet.

The American Ballet was homeless once again, with limited performing opportunities. A handful of the dancers, with Kirstein as the director, presented ballets on summer tours under the name Ballet Caravan, rarely playing New York seasons. Balanchine was invited to work on Broadway and in Hollywood, and employed many of his dancers in both places. The school, however, kept on training young pupils for the day when performance opportunities would be available. In 1941 Nelson Rockefeller, then a State Department official, asked the company to undertake a good-will tour of South America, and the dancers from the Ballet Caravan and the American Ballet joined under the name American Ballet Caravan for the six-month trip. American involvement in World War II began a few months after the return of the company from its South American tour and effectively ended the company's existence until 1946. During the seven years that it had been operating though, Balanchine had demonstrated clearly his mastery as a choreographer of genius and as a teacher. The School of American Ballet continued to function and began to provide a new generation of dancers in the postwar years.

When Balanchine was offered the opportunity to work on Broadway in the Ziegfield Follies, he accepted. By this time Florenz Ziegfeild had passed away, but the Shubert Organization continued to produce the Ziegfeild Follies, adhering in their fashion to the tradition that had been established. For the 1936 edition, which opened in January they engaged Balanchine to do the ballets. The show was the biggest hit of the season, and from that point on dancing played an integral part in the plot line of many musicals. Slowly over the next decade the versatility of Broadway dancers grew. It was no longer acceptable to be able to kick and swing arms in unison, the dancing vocabulary was being expanded to accommodate dramatic expression as part of the plot development. Thus the unity of dialogue, dance, and song was given its first big push forward.

It was Balanchine's first show in America and Josephine Baker, the dancer for whom Balanchine had been hired to choreograph, left the show to return to Paris where she was unquestionably adored, and the Shuberts decided to rework the Bakerless show without Balanchine. In the meanwhile he had been recommended to Richard Rogers and his librettist Lorenz Hart, who were pulling together the show "On Your Toes" for that same season. When Balanchine signed to do the show he stipulated that he be called a choreographer and billed as such in the program and any advertising, including the marquee. Previously, the assigned title had been dance arranger, and the new designation was a first for Broadway. It was the first time a choreographer had been designated as such, and the practice has continued. Balanchine was the first person to both direct and choreograph a musical as well, and he was so successful that the door was opened for other professional director- choreographers. In the next three decades Jerome Robins, Agnes DeMille, Michael Kidd, Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse, and Gower Champion would use the position brilliantly.

Hollywood, with its production schedule of hundreds of pictures a year, sought fresh new talent and beckoned to Balanchine after "On Your Toes" became a hit. Between 1938 and 1942 when he returned to Broadway for good, Balanchine created dance sequences in four movies.

Balanchine's career in the popular theater was basically divided into pre- and post-Hollywood. In the years prior to the outbreak of World War II he seemed to be able to work happily in both ballet and Broadway productions, and between 1938 and 1940 he devoted full energies to Broadway. The Hollywood years with their frustrations stopped the innovative enthusiasm Balanchine brought to mass entertainment. In the middle 1940s he became increasingly dissatisfied with the musical theater and for a time returned to be artistic director of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

With the end of World War II, Kirstein returned from army service determined to revive the American Ballet, and in 1946 asked Balanchine to be its artistic head. The new group called Ballet Society lasted two years before becoming a constituent of the New York City Center, changing its name to the New York City Ballet in 1948. It was through this company that Balanchine's neoclassical style was developed and spread across the world. His most productive years had been 1936-1940, in which he choreographed eight shows with innovative approaches.

For the next decade and a half the company was based in the New York City Center for Music and Drama's 55th Street Theater. Balanchine was at the height of his powers. It was a period of extended experiment combined with sustained invention using scores of the classical repertoire. He drew on such music standards as "Swan Lake" and "Firebird" as well as commissioned concert jazz "Modern Jazz: Variants from Gunther Schuller" or Westernized Oriental music such as "Bugaku" by Toshiro Myuzumi. He created the first ballet using Ive's music and, commissioned "Agon" from Stravinsky. He collaborated with Martha Graham using the orchestral scores of Anton von Webern and created a ballet to his first electronic score, "Electronics", by Remi Gassman and Oskar Sala. Compositions by Mozart, Brahams, Gounoud, Donizetti, Glazunov, Handel and Vivaldi sat on the music stands with works by Sousa, Gottschalk, and traditional Western folk tunes. For sheer variety and inspiration, no choreographer had ever demonstrated such high level inventiveness.

Although the experimental high-water mark of the New York City Center years (1948-1964) was the dry, bare-bones "Agon", Balanchine continued his output of mainstream works in a variety of forms. He presented forty-seven new ballets and seven revivals. The seventeen-year span during which New York City Ballet was residing at City Center saw an enormous expansion in the performing seasons. The performing weeks, which numbered two at the beginning, expanded to ten times that amount, as a loyal, discriminating audience steadily developed and the School of American Ballet steadily graduated young dancers of exceptional talent into the company. The company made two extensive tours of Europe, which established its international reputation.

One of Balanchine's works, "Stars and Stripes", was to perform on the Ed Sullivan show in 1958, but the camera could only fit six of the forty-one dancers, so Balanchine turned the offer down. For the next twenty years Balanchine received various offers to present his ballets on television, all of which he resisted. He didn't like the way the camera made the dancers' noses and feet long and their legs short, but in 1962, when an opportunity to work with Stravinsky was presented, he relented. "Noah and the Flood" was the result, and Balanchine hated it. What bothered him the most, however, was the manner in which the ballet was presented. It did not represent the best that the dancers could do because the time-pressed director accepted flawed takes as being good enough, rather than holding out for the best possible presentation of the choreography. In a way it was a repeat of the frustrations he experienced in Hollywood thirty years previously. He avoided American television for the next decade and a half, and his company appeared on telecasts of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and German television. It was only in the late 1970s when the National Educational Television offered him the opportunity and the time to restage his ballets properly for the two-dimensional image that he began a comfortable relationship with the medium in America.

In 1964 the company was offered the opportunity to move to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, which was then being constructed. The theater was built as a house designed for dance, and offered the company a chance to mount productions on a large scale. Balanchine created four new full-evening ballets, in addition to redesigning two others for the larger theater. While he continued to design lean, stripped-down ballets, the new, large scale house encouraged him to work on a number of shorter ballets that were as lushly conceived as the full-evening works. During the company's first four years of residence at State Theater (1964-1967) Balanchine created four new full evening productions; more than the number he had done during the whole of his previous career. Balanchine did not begin to create evening-length ballets until his fiftieth year and he was seventy when he produced "Coppelia", one of his most famous ballets. Having come to the form later in life he showed himself completely comfortable with its demands. Whether he would have produced more of them in other circumstances is open to conjecture. What can be said is that given the resources of the State Theater he used them to the fullest.

While his "Jewels" (eventually known as "the first evening-length abstract ballet") and the three other evening-length works he created for the stage of New York State Theater all enjoyed success, nothing in the history of New York City Ballet ever was received as rapturously on such a sustained basis as Balanchine's "the Nutcracker". The ballet was recostumed and redesigned for the new house on a lavish scale and has solidly occupied a sold-out block of five straight weeks during the Christmas season, and it looks as if it will continue to do so in perpetuity. Not only is it the most durable money-making production the company has ever had, it functions as an irresistible magnet drawing students to the School of American Ballet. Almost unnoticed in the furor is the fact that it is a very good ballet.

In an interview with Balanchine Jonathon Cott commented, "The French poet Mallarme once talked about a dancer 'writing with her body.'" Balanchine replied: "Naturally. But not with words. You see, I got a message. Each one of us is here to serve on this earth. And probably I was sent here to see and hear - that's all I can do. I can't see something that doesn't exist. I don't create anything or invent anything, I assemble. God already made everything - color, flowers, language - and somehow there had to be a Mother. Our business is to chose. The more you chose, the more amazing everything is. But I can't explain what I do."

Essentially, the basis for Balanchine's mature development was laid down in the imperial ballet school and theater system in Russia. Technically, he developed the classical vocabulary of Petipa as he learned it, and thematically, he explored the relationships of men with women as beloved, the Muse, and unattainable object of affection and need. In each role, woman was the stimulant. Following Fokine's preference for danced gesture over mime, Balanchine dispensed almost totally with traditional mime in framing his new ballets and later in life removed such passages of it that he had incorporated into "Apollo" and Tchaikovsky's "Piano Concerto no. 2". Again as an admirer of Fokine's innovative use of the corps de ballet as a character in and of itself, he began his own approach to animating this large mass of dancers. As much as Balanchine has contributed to the artistic development of twentieth-century ballet, he has always reaffirmed his connection with the nineteenth-century tradition of Petipa. The technique that had been developed in the imperial system remained the bedrock vocabulary for Balanchine, though he rejected or modified some of its conventions. As a choreographer who initially fought tradition, he has emerged as its foremost exponent.

Balanchine apparently never felt the need for close friendship with another man. He enjoyed company at the dinner table and liked conversation in small doses, but nothing deeper. Both Kirstein and Dmitriev, who saw him daily for years on end, disclaimed the title of intimate friend. If he took a pretty girl to dinner though, it was unusual if he did not try to make love to her. He often claimed that the ballet he represented made the woman most important. If the woman didn't exist, in his opinion, there wouldn't be a ballet. Ballet to him was a feminine form, it was matriarchal. And he had to serve her.

While Balanchine's all-consuming interest in making ballets for female bodies has produced a string of masterful ballets, it has tended to destabilize his relationships with the women themselves. Tamara Geva writes candidly of her marriage to Balanchine when they were both teenagers in Russia in the aftermath of the revolution. Because of the unsettled times, her father abruptly suggested to them that they would be better off married. A bit taken aback the two agreed and were married in 1923. They managed to leave Russia a year later and were hired by Diaghilev for his company; she as a dancer and he as a dancer and choreographer. Diaghilev then proceeded to dictate the ballets and their casting, none of which included Geva in any major way. She left and Balanchine stayed. His attention fell on Alexandra Danilova, who had fled Russia with them and was now one of the reigning ballerinas of the company. Their relationship lasted until he chose not to include her in a new company that was being formed in 1932. After his emigration to the United States he met and married Vera Zorina in 1939. Their marriage foundered after he choreographed a couple of unsuccessful Broadway musicals, one of which starred Zorina. In 1946 he married Maria Tallchief, but the marriage was annulled six years later. He married another ballerina from the company, Tanaquil LeClerq, in 1952 but her career was ended by a polio attack in 1956 and Balanchine abandoned dance to stay with her. Eventually, however, the pull of ballet brought him back and they were quietly divorced years later. He never married again but continued to have various Muses to inspire him, most notable among whom have been Suzanne Farrell and then the youthful Darci Kistler, promoted to principal ballerina of the company at age 18.

Angels are androgyne, lacking heavy bosoms and buttocks. Ballerinas are kin to both angels and those mythic Amazons who sliced off a breast to shoot arrows the more efficiently. The criterion of becoming a professional dancer owns not only a particular psychic tempering, but also peculiar anatomical configuration. Balanchine's strict standard controlled his company. The few deliberately outstanding exceptions in height or style became his general rule. His corps was and is a band of brothers and sisters; maybe it is no accident that it contains so many twins and siblings. He would say, of those he could or would not accept, "She (or he) doesn't look like a dancer."

Balanchine always claimed that "you can't sit down and think about dancing, you have to get up and dance. You take people and move them and see if their movements correspond to the music." When choreographing a ballet, the most important first step for him was thorough familiarity with the score so that the overall shape of the ballet corresponded to the musical "plot". The actual movement was only determined when he worked with his dancers in the studio. He did not arrive at a rehearsal with set gestures developed beforehand, but they emerged in creative exchange with the dancers present. Balanchine had learned a notation system in school, but he could compose only with flesh and blood before him, like a sculptor with clay, "putting off here, taking on there". One of his dancers, Alicia Markova, claimed that working with Balanchine was like a lesson in arithmetic. "Give me this leg, give me this hand" - and suddenly the whole sum would come out right.

Balanchine continued to work prolifically through the early 1970s when his health began to slowly fail. He suffered a minor heart attack and in June of 1979 underwent triple bypass surgery because he could no longer endure the severe angina attacks he was suffering. He recovered quickly and continued to work for another year and a half until his health again declined, much more rapidly. In mid-April of 1982 Balanchine went to see Dr. Seymour Soloman, of Montefiore Hospital for a complete neurological examination. Though the exam produced few discernible findings and no reliable diagnosis, Balanchine was suffering. At times he felt as if a factory were operating in his head. He could no longer play the piano, for he said that if he touched only one note, he found the din intolerable. Even when there were no external noises, there was a constant roaring in his ears. His vision was fuzzy as well, but most distressing was how tottery he had become. On April 30, 1983 George Balanchine died a peaceful death of pneumonia. At the time of his death, more than 60 troupes throughout the world were performing his ballets; today more than 100 companies perform at least one Balanchine work. Upon his death, it was written in the New York Review of Books that "George Balanchine liked to say, quoting Mayakovsky, 'I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers.' And now that luminous cloud has floated off, leaving us with a loss far deeper than the grave."

LITERATURE CITED

A Ballet Society Book. Portraits of Mr. B: Photographs of George Balanchine. New York: The Viking Press, 1984.

Buckle, Richard. George Balanchine: Ballet Master. New York: Random House, 1988.

Flatow, Sheryl. "The Balanchine Trust: Guardian of the Legacy". Dance Magazine. December 1990, p 58-61.

McDonagh, Don. George Balanchine. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

Reynolds, Nancy. "Balanchine in the USSR: Cultural Revelation". Dance Magazine. January 1994, p 88-90.

Taper, Bernard. Balanchine: A Biography. New York: Times Books, 1984.