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The New York City Ballet After Balanchine
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11210 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1986 |
2,516 Words |
| Author
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Paul Gregory
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When after a long and debilitating illness, George Balanchine died on April 30, 1983, a major chapter in the history of dance closed. There were those who wondered what would become of the New York City Ballet, the organization he shaped into one of America's few world-class dance companies, and others who predicted that his pair of successors, Jerome Robbins and Peter Martins, would be unable to sustain the troupe, much less to advance its standing within the performing arts field.
Three years after Mr. Balanchine's death, the City Ballet is a different place, but it is definitely surviving, and there are many who think it is actually prospering. Founder Lincoln Kirstein, now seventy-nine, still keeps a close watch in the artistic decisions made by the co-ballet Masters-in Chief Robbins and Martins, and his advice on all matters, from financial to political to philosophical, is heeded. Jerome Robbins, who took a back seat to Balanchine since joining the company for the second time in 1969, is still choreographing within the Broadway vein that gained him fame back in 1944, and Peter Martins, for twenty years Balanchine's leading danseur noble, is creating new works as well, drawing from both his early training in Denmark and his experience under the tyrannical Balanchine. The chemistry of Robbins and Martins at first seemed in danger of explosion, but now the two men, one sixty-eight, the other forty, seem to be sharing their power as equal peers in an organization that cannot bear much more stress.
Balanchine is widely regarded as the single most influential and talented force in ballet of the twentieth century, and his shoes are thus well nigh impossible to fill. Born in Russia in 1904, he began the study of music theory at an early age, and quickly achieved a solid foundation in composition, counterpoint, and harmony, elements which would serve him well throughout his long career. At the age of ten he made his dancing debut in the role of "Cupid" in the Maryinsky Theatre Ballet Company production of The Sleeping Beauty, and at the age of seventeen joined the troupe as a member of the corps. Even at this early point in his development Balanchine was choreographing, and one work from this period, Enigmas, created for the Maryinsky, is still with us.
The summer of 1924 presented Balanchine the opportunity of touring Western Europe with three other young dancers, Alexandra Danilova, Tamara Geva, and Nicholas Efimoff. And four attained fame outside the Soviet Union, and were invited by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev to audition for his Balletes Russes company. Following a Paris tryout, each of the four was
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