On Music

...These works have no story, and consequently no pantomime or scenery...

...Having rapidly risen almost entirely on the strength of Balanchine's artistic genius and Kirstein's gifts for organization, business and propaganda, the New York City Ballet is now being borne aloft by powerful winds of civic and national pride...

...The book version of this exemplary profile contains much additional biographical detail along with dozens of interesting illustrations...

...Like all natural improvisers, he proceeds simply, inventing the dance step by step, eating his way through the score, sometimes revising the work as it evolves, sometimes coming back later to alter or improve on the original idea...

...Balanchine treatment of his dancers is often heartless (a point soft-pedalled by Taper): He never praises them, is ruthlessly sarcastic, and his cramping technical demands, dancers complain, render them incapable of working for anyone else...

...A "creature," to use a favorite Balanchine term, rather than a woman, this epicene figure sprung from the 20th century mind in all its vivacity and spontaneity...

...Balanchine's most profound affinity is with the visual arts, and especially with relatively static but powerfully modelled plastic forms...

...What is more, to the traditional steps and combinations Balanchine has added many new movements derived from jazz, the Broadway stage and the circus arena...

...Beginning in 1934 with Serenade, and continuing through Concerto Barocco (1940), Four Temperaments (1946), Agon (1957), and Episodes (1959)—to name only the finest examples—he has developed a distinctly modern kind of classical ballet...

...The conventional handling of the ballerina by her partner, which traditionally is merely a highly stylized makeshift, in Balanchine's work becomes a significant self-projection— the male partner manipulating the ballerina like a mechanical doll or a life-size puppet...

...Much of Taper's book appeared several years ago as a New Yorker profile and I can distinctly recall the cool, gratifying sensation that came with reading the splendid opening section: a fascinating description of Balanchine's creative method built up from impressions formed after hours of watching the master patiently at work in his studio...

...And, like violent dissonances in classical music, the dancers sometimes flagrantly violate rudimentary balletic form by turning their limbs in, flexing the instep, or pirouetting on bent legs...

...the scores are unmitigatedly highbrow—Bach, Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern...

...But Balanchine's treatment of this stock subject is, to say the least, curious, and to some even disturbing...

...B., then, is worthy of homage, and homage of a particularly fine and fragrant kind he receives in Bernard Taper's biography, Balanchine (Harper & Row, 342 pp., $8.95...

...Tanaquil LeClercq was perhaps the most perfect realization of Balanchine's ideal, though her successor, Allegra Kent, often achieves the same ariel effect...

...But unlike Petipa and Fokine, who inherited their richly endowed companies and theaters, Balanchine has had to carve his kingdom out of the wilderness...

...Often the impression is that of a sculptor modeling a figure and bending it this way and that, utterly indifferent to the condition of his material...

...and they concentrate intensely on the plastic manipulation of the body, which is frankly exposed in functional practice clothes...

...As it is the individual performer who inspires Balanchine, he naturally develops each role in terms of the dancer for whom it is intended...

...There have never been any children because Balanchine is firmly opposed to dancers behaving like ordinary females...

...Indeed, as time goes on, George Balanchine's work has come to seem at least equally suited to the museum as to the theater...

...Trained in piano and composition, accustomed to reading scores (and occasionally conducting them), Balanchine always uses good music and allows it to dictate the form and much of the detail of his work...

...All this must deeply gratify Balanchine, as indeed it should...

...For Balanchine "ballet is woman...

...For many, one of Balanchine's greatest virtues is his musicality...

...or in the extraordinary movement in Ivesiana in which the ballerina never once touches the floor, being finally carried out on the mens' heads while her lover grovels before her with spastic motions...

...His dancers mix their pirouettes and glissades with hair-raising falls and back flips, slinky drag steps, and even variations on rock 'n' roll...

...The glorification of the female and its corollary, the debasement of the male, are obvious in such sequences as the conclusion of Serenade, where the ballerina is borne off standing on three men, with other women following at a distance paying her homage...

...Always the master craftsman, he has himself served many masters (from Serge Diaghilev to Sam Goldwyn), concocted many balletic dishes (from a full-length classic ballet to a polka for circus elephants), and acted in such varied capacities as choreographer, costume designer and character dancer...

...But his remarkable gift for inventing plastic analogues to musical figures is not matched by a corresponding ability to determine and project the emotional substance of music...

...Ever since the company's triumphant Russian tour in 1962, it has been clear that something big would have to be done for America's finest cultural weapon in the cold war...

...In Balanchine, the basic technique of the classical ballet is preserved, but in every detail it is subtly modified by his characteristic taste: the attack is stronger, the accent sharper, the turnout exaggerated, the definition of the movement is stark, and each step and attitude is charged with tension and alertness...

...Thus, working with a brilliant ballerina like Patricia Wilde, who identifies with the Russian tradition, he makes extensive use of this dancer's characteristic capacities— her great elevation, fast batterie, extraordinary endurance and wonderful smoothness of line...

...Five of these women have been his wives...

...Despite the non-representational character of these works, one sees running through them all the conventional balletic theme of the romantic relation between a man and woman...

...But if the pas de deux project the choreographer's cool mastery over his beautiful instrument, many other passages in these works again remind us that "ballet is woman...

...Working for almost 40 years in a medium that corrupts as easily as it evanesces, he has neither sought success at the cost of artistic integrity nor insisted on art when only entertainment was wanted...

...Balanchine's principal artistic achievement is the invention of the so-called abstract ballet...

...Taper's profile reveals Balanchine as essentially an improvisatory artist: a superbly self-confident maker who creates his ballets publicly, deriving his inspiration partly from the music and even more from the appearance of the young men and women ranged before him...

...The recent Ford Foundation grant of $2 million may prove merely the first of a series of generous boosts from a country eager to support successful cultural institutions and increasingly interested in adopting that waif of the arts—the classic dance...

...In just 30 years, with the assistance of his patron and colleague, Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine has created in America a school and a style, a company and a repertory of classic ballet...

...but the repertory far surpasses any collection of dances currently being performed anywhere...

...B. Like the great Cham of Tartary, George Balanchine today reigns over a rapidly expanding dance empire that in resources and prestige may yet rival the fabulous czarist institutions once presided over by Marius Petipa and Michel Fokine...

...As yet the company only approximates the discipline, skill and talent of the foremost European troupes...

...His pas de deux are boldly sexual while at the same time utterly devoid of emotion...

...The sensuousness, suavity and emotionality of the traditional technique has been severely repressed along with many of the bravura figures...

...I should not be surprised if, when the New York City Ballet opens next month at its austere new home in Lincoln Center, the general impression will be that of a gallery of living sculptures...

...Eventually, they all left him (without acrimony), save for his present wife, Miss LeClercq, who is today an invalid...

...Though Balanchine displays remarkable versatility in adapting his powers of invention to each dancer's particular strengths and weaknesses, he has always held a clear image of the ideal dancer—an image he has sought to realize by the early selection and careful training of "baby ballerinas" in his school...

...A definite physical type— small headed, with long slender legs and a strong, supple back— the Balanchine ballerina differs from the traditional dancer in being lighter, faster and more nimble...

...Characteristic of these abstract ballets, too, is the ingenious interweaving of groups of dancers holding hands—the socalled Balanchine "pretzels"—as well as sequences in which the dancer twists into a binding position from which she then escapes with Houdini-like dexterity...

...He seems to systematically undermine the egos of some dancers, either requiring them to do roles that are beneath them or exciting their ambition only to disappoint them in the end...

...they are relatively short but crammed with dance activity...

...The relationship in each case followed the same pattern: He has taught them their roles, cared for them at home with almost maternal solicitude—cooking meals and running errands while they rested after their strenuous exertions—and acted the part of faithful friend and adviser...

...Consequently, he regards his finest ballerinas as precious instruments which must be carefully protected, preserved and kept in perfect condition...