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America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures: the First 100
Melissa Hayden and members of the New York City Ballet in George Balanchine's Stars and Stripes (1958) with music by John Philip Sousa arranged by Hershey Kay. (Photograph by Martha Swope; used by permission of TimePix. Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust.) |
The last of several companies founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, the New York City Ballet has been the premier American company since it came into existence in 1948. Balanchine, who died in 1983, created an extraordinary body of work for the company, which is the chief repository of his choreography and remains identified with its neoclassical style, experimentalist impulse, and aesthetic. Choreographer Jerome Robbins, in an association that lasted nearly forty years, created numerous works for the company as well. NYCB changed the way Americans danced. It created a new canon of classics, a repertory unrivaled in its diversity by any other twentieth-century company. It created a new kind of ballerina—tall, speedy, powerful, articulate—and made stars of Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell, Merrill Ashley, Kyra Nichols, and Wendy Whelan. Through its former dancers, who are now teaching and directing companies throughout the United States, it has had an incalculable impact on the entire field of American ballet. Since 1983 the company has been directed by Peter Martins. www.nycballet.com
The Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts provides information and multimedia documents about dance—old and new—to the dance community and the general public. On average, over 12,000 people a year study oral histories, manuscripts, photographs, original designs, engravings, books, programs, reviews, and other materials in the world's most comprehensive dance library. The Division actively documents dance works, using experienced professional videographers, and initiates oral history interviews with artists. Its study collection ranges from anthropologist Claire Holt's photographs of Javanese ritual to the letters and choreographic notes of modern dance pioneer Doris Humphrey. Recent additions include the Rudolf Nureyev Collection, the Jerome Robbins Collection, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation Collection. In the fall of 2001, the Library for the Performing Arts returned to a newly renovated building in Lincoln Center. www.nypl.org
The Nicholas Brothers performing "Chattanooga Choo Choo" from the film Sun Valley Serenade (1941). (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
For sixty years The Nicholas Brothers—Fayard (1914-2006) and Harold (1921-2000)—led distinctive careers as masters of tap and "flash dancers." Hired in 1932 at the Cotton Club, the two were 18 and 11 years old, respectively, and already had professional credentials. Appearances with major bands led to the brothers' first film Pie, Pie Blackbird, a Vitaphone short with Eubie Blake. Kid Millions (1934) marked their Hollywood debut, and subsequent movies included Down Argentine Way (1940), Stormy Weather (1943), and St. Louis Woman (1946). Besides performing with major bands in the 1930s and 1940s, the two were on stage in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, Babes in Arms, and Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1936 in London. During the 1960s the pair were featured in three Hollywood Palace television specials. Two decades later, Harold performed in the national tour of Sophisticated Ladies (1982) and on Broadway in The Tap Dance Kid (1986), while Fayard contributed choreography to Black and Blue (1989). Kennedy Center Honors were received in 1991 and, a year later, The Nicholas Brothers: We Dance and Sing was produced as a documentary. www.nicholasbrothers.com
Bronislava Nijinska in a studio pose. (Photograph from the archives of Jacob's Pillow, Becket, Massachusetts.) |
The most important woman choreographer of twentieth-century ballet, Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972) was born in Minsk, Russia. She graduated from the Imperial Ballet School in Saint Petersburg in 1908, and the following year, with her fabulously talented brother, Vaslav Nijinsky, took part in the triumphant Paris season of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In 1911 she joined forces permanently with Diaghilev and began to assist Nijinsky in his innovative choreography. She returned to Russia in 1914, opened a studio in Kiev, and created her first modernist compositions. Rejoining the Ballets Russes, she choreographed Les Noces (1923) and Les Biches (1924), two of her greatest works and early statements of neoclassicism. In the 1920s and 1930s she created works for the Paris Opera Ballet and the Ida Rubinstein company, as well as several short-lived troupes of her own. She choreographed the dances for Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), which brought her to Hollywood, where she opened a studio in 1941. During the 1940s she staged works for Ballet Theatre, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and the Marquis de Cuevas company. Among her students were Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. She died in Pacific Palisades, California.
Alwin Nikolais's 1959 work Allegory. (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
A great experimentalist of modern dance, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) was born in Southington, Connecticut. He studied dance with Truda Kaschmann, a former student of Mary Wigman, and with Hanya Holm at the Bennington School of Dance, creating his first choreography for Hartford theater productions. After serving in the armed forces, he settled in New York. In 1948 he initiated a twenty-two-year association with the Henry Street Playhouse, where he formed the Nikolais Dance Theatre and produced his unique brand of dance theater. He developed a corps of dedicated young dancers, including Murray Louis and Phyllis Lamhut; broke away from narrative and Freudian dance drama; and began to explore abstraction. His works were characterized by an interaction of light, sound, color, time, shape, objects, and moving bodies. Nikolais was unique among his peers in that he was responsible for the complete production of his work, not just the choreography. He was fascinated by decentralization, and in many of his works the body was indistinguishable from its surrounding environment.
Rudolf Nureyev in a studio shot. (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
One of the most celebrated male dancers of the twentieth century, Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993) was born in Siberia. He grew up in Ufa, where he began dancing with a children's folk troupe, and against almost insuperable odds won admission to the Vaganova Choreographic Institute and eventually a place in the Kirov Ballet. In 1961, while on tour with the company in Paris, he asked for political asylum. He was the first Soviet dancer to defect—and thanks to his "leap to freedom," as the press called it, an overnight celebrity. He made his New York debut with Sonia Arova, but it was his magical partnership with Margot Fonteyn, a highlight of Britain's Royal Ballet's many tours of the 1960s, that captured American hearts. He was an exotically beautiful man, a virtuoso with the passion of a Byronic hero and the charisma of a rock star. He staged masterpieces of the nineteenth-century Russian repertory, such as the third act of Raymonda and the Kingdom of the Shades scene from La Bayadère. He danced for television and in films, and more than 250 live performances a year—an astonishing tally. From 1983 until he died of AIDS in 1993, he was artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet.
Michael Arshansky, Paul Nickel, and Alberta Grant in a c.1954 photograph of act 1, scene 1 of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker (1954). (Photograph by Fred'k Melton; from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Choreography by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust.) |
First produced in 1892 at Saint Petersburg's Imperial Ballet with choreography by Lev Ivanov after a choreographic plan by Marius Petipa, The Nutcracker has become a beloved American classic. The ballet was introduced to American audiences in a truncated version by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and in an idiosyncratic one by Willam Christensen for the San Francisco Ballet. However, it was George Balanchine's 1954 production by the New York City Ballet, which featured children from the School of American Ballet and a tree that grew magically up to the flies that transformed the ballet into popular Christmas entertainment. Scores of Nutcrackers are produced each year. Most are community events, presented by local organizations with local children for an audience of parents and friends. For established companies the ballet is a moneymaker that can generate more than fifty percent of annual earned income. In recent decades some choreographers have reworked the story so as to create more satisfying, adult entertainment. The best of these efforts is Mark Morris' The Hard Nut (1991), a hilarious, gender-bending version set in the 1950s.
Ruth Page in a studio shot. (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
Dancer, choreographer, company director, and pioneering Chicago dance figure for over half a century, Ruth Page (1899-1991) was born in Indianapolis. She studied fancy dancing with Anna Stanton and ballet with Elizabetta Menzeli, made her professional debut on Broadway, then toured South America with Anna Pavlova. During the 1920s Page worked closely with Adolph Bolm, starring in his productions for Chicago Allied Arts and choreographing her first successful dances for its repertory. Settling in Chicago, she became premiere danseuse of the Ravinia Opera. In the 1930s, in partnership with Bentley Stone, she created Frankie and Johnny (1938) and several other Americana ballets, most to commissioned scores by American composers; she also worked with Katherine Dunham and Harald Kreutzberg, exploring a broad range of expression. In the following decades she created a number of works inspired by operas, founded the Chicago Opera Ballet, and formed the Ruth Page Foundation for Dance, a school she co-directed with Larry Long. Sophisticated, open-minded, and energetic, she gave opportunities and exposure to countless American and international dance artists. www.ruthpage.com
Anna Pavlova. (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
The greatest ballerina of her time, Anna Pavlova (1881-1931) was born in humble circumstances in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In 1899 she became a member of the Imperial Ballet, where her rare gifts quickly attracted attention. Blessed with ethereal lightness, she excelled in lyrical roles such as Nikiya in La Bayadère and the title role of Giselle. She was also unusually expressive, an aspect of her personality that Michel Fokine successfully exploited in The Dying Swan, which became her most famous solo. She made her first foreign tour in 1907 and the first of several whistle-stopping U.S. tours in 1910. Initially supported by a small group of Polish and Russian soloists, her company, founded in 1913, eventually included a number of Americans. In 1915 she joined forces with the Boston Grand Opera Company, giving joint performances of opera and ballet; the following year she filmed The Dumb Girl of Portici in Hollywood and staged an abridged version of The Sleeping Beauty at the New York Hippodrome. She carried the banner of classicism to the far corners of the United States and inspired a generation of young Americans to study ballet.
Eleanor Powell in the film Born to Dance (1936). (Photograph from the Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.) |
Eleanor Powell (1912-1982)—dancer, singer and actress—was often hailed as the world's greatest female tapper, an ironic achievement for an artist who took only ten formal tap lessons. Trained in ballet and acrobatics, Powell was first discovered on an Atlantic City beach. She performed in New York nightclubs and vaudeville throughout the 1920s, while concluding that tap skills were necessary for Broadway opportunities. Consequently, Powell enrolled for lessons with Jack Donahue and Johnny Doyle, who provided a rehearsal belt weighted with bags of sand to dissipate her aerial qualities. In 1929 she made her Broadway debut in Follow Thru. When George White's 1935 Scandals was filmed, Powell was discovered by MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who initiated her Hollywood career with Broadway Melody of 1936. She won acclaim for roles in big-budget movie musicals and was paired with Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940 for "Begin the Beguine," her most famous number. Although the 1950 Duchess of Idaho was her last film, Powell toured during the 1960s with her own nightclub act.
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