Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Steichen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
New Approach ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Work ◽  
Collaborative Efforts

This introduction explains that the early collaborative efforts of George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein have been written about in ways that misrepresented the true character of their activity during the 1930s. It shows how a “received history” has come to define this period, which is construed as leading to the inevitable success of the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet. It contextualizes the goals of this book in relation to recent innovations in the study of twentieth-century dance and music, in particular scholarship on modernism, and makes the case for a new approach to this period of cultural history. It argues that a lack of clarity regarding this formative period in Balanchine and Kirstein’s collaborative enterprise has led to misunderstandings regarding the past, present, and future meaning of their individual and collective work.

Making Ballet 3

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Movement Analysis ◽  
Story Line ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Ballet History ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

Making Ballet 3 provides a choreographic analysis of the ballet Western Symphony, produced by the New York City Ballet in 1954 with choreography by George Balanchine, music by Hershy Kay, scenery by John Boyt, and costumes by Karinska. It brings to light the multitude of intertextual allusions that occur throughout the ballet, playfully intermingling references of “America” with an entire lineage of nineteenth-century European classicism. Although Western Symphony has no story line, it crafts a deliberate message: a long, transatlantic genealogy of Western classicism that, in the twentieth century, has come to rest in America. Drawing on archival sources and movement analysis, this interchapter argues that Western Symphony incorporates parody to present a revisionist ballet history in which the high cultural lineages of Europe and America are intimately entwined. Ultimately, this message reinforced the Atlanticist politics of private and state anticommunist groups in the cultural Cold War, the historical setting for its production and performance.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Balanchine, George (1904–1983)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Reynolds
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
Classical Dance ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Classical Ballet

George Balanchine (Georgii Melitonovich Balanchivadze), arguably the greatest ballet choreographer of the twentieth century, was at once both modernist and traditionalist. Unlike many radical innovators, in charting new ground he did not reject the past. Virtually all of his major works make reference, even if obliquely, to the classical ballet technique in which he was trained. Although born in Russia and active in Europe in the early part of his career, it was in America that he made his greatest impact, directing the New York City Ballet, which he co-founded with Lincoln Kirstein, from its inception in 1948 until his death in 1983. During this time, the company grew from modest beginnings to become one of the most important ballet troupes in the world. Balanchine is credited with creating a particularly American style of classical dance, one that is characterized by speed, precision, energy, daring, and a rough grace more associated with athletes than with sylphs. His more than 400 dance works include Apollo (1928), Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de cristal (later renamed Symphony in C) (1948), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981).

“Culture Morphology” and Cultural History in Berenice Abbott's Changing New York

Prospects ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 255-291
Author(s):  
John Raeburn
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
York City ◽  
Farm Security Administration ◽  
Culture Morphology ◽  
Federal Arts Project

Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.

Nietzsche's Looming Presence in the 1930s Dance Polemics of John Martin and Lincoln Kirstein

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-203
Author(s):  
Rachel Straus
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Modern Dancers

Some of the most perplexingly antagonistic comments about the differences between modern dance and ballet can be found strewn throughout the works of two pioneering twentieth-century American dance writers: John Martin (1893–1985) –  The New York Times's first permanent dance critic, champion of modern dancers and early supporter of Martha Graham ( Kisselgoff et al. 1988 : 44) – and Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996), the prodigious author, impresario, and balletomane, who cofounded with George Balanchine the New York City Ballet. Looming behind a significant number of Martin's and Kirstein's appraisals and condemnations of modern dance and ballet are Friedrich Nietzsche's aesthetics, particularly his Apollonian-Dionysian conceptualisations. This essay investigates the reception of Nietzsche in the context of the 1930s writing of these two dance critics, particularly in respect to their treatment of gender. Foundational for this essay's development are the analyses of Nietzsche's reception by earlier twentieth-century dance figures in the works of Susan Jones (2013 , 2010 ), Susan Manning (2006) and Kimerer LaMothe (2006) .

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Steichen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Broadway Musicals

George Balanchine is today one of the most celebrated figures in twentieth-century ballet and is closely identified with the two institutions he helped found in collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein: the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. During the early years of their efforts in the 1930s, Balanchine and Kirstein’s enterprise underwent numerous changes and transformations. The complexity of their endeavors has been misrepresented in many existing accounts of their lives and careers, in part because their activities have not been assessed as a whole. This book chronicles Balanchine’s and Kirstein’s work between 1933 and 1940 in the spheres of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood cinema. This new account shows the ways in which their collective and individual efforts influenced and affected one another and ultimately shaped the character of the institutions they would eventually found. The work of the short-lived organizations the American Ballet (1935–38) and Ballet Caravan (1936–40) brought together dozens of dancers and collaborators, and the activity of these companies was closely related to work of the School of American Ballet as well as Balanchine’s projects in Broadway musical theater and film.

The Problematic Past in the Work of Charles Sheeler, 1917–1927

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-580
Author(s):  
DAVID PETERS CORBETT
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Short Film ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ashcan School ◽  
Charles Sheeler ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In

AbstractThis article examines the place of the past in Charles Sheeler's photographs and paintings made in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, around 1917, in New York City during the 1920s, and in the short film of New York, Manhatta (1921), which he made with the photographer Paul Strand. It situates these works in the context of the scholarship on Sheeler and on the art of New York in the early twentieth century, in particular that of the Ashcan School and of visual representation which attends to the architectural fabric of the city in preference to depicting its inhabitants. The article argues that although the scholarship has identified Sheeler's interest in making connections with the American past, it has not recognized the fraught nature of that relationship. By looking at the Doylestown and New York pictures, the analysis demonstrates how the problematic status of the past for Sheeler appears in these works as hauntings and absences.

Q & A. Lisa Randall. [interview]

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adib Rifqi Setiawan
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Particle Physics ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Past ◽  
Talent Search ◽  
Cosmological Inflation ◽  
On Line ◽  
Theoretical Physicist ◽  
Fundamental Forces

Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist working in particle physics and cosmology. She was born in Queens, New York City, on June 18, 1962. Lisa Randall is an alumna of Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics; and she graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1980. She won first place in the 1980 Westinghouse Science Talent Search at the age of 18; and at Harvard University, Lisa Randall earned both a BA in physics (1983) and a PhD in theoretical particle physics (1987) under advisor Howard Mason Georgi III, a theoretical physicist. She is currently Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science on the physics faculty of Harvard University, where he has been for the past a decade. Her works concerns elementary particles and fundamental forces, and has involved the study of a wide variety of models, the most recent involving dimensions. She has also worked on supersymmetry, Standard Model observables, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, grand unified theories, and general relativity. Consequently, her studies have made her among the most cited and influential theoretical physicists and she has received numerous awards and honors for her scientific endeavors. Since December 27, 2010 at 00:42 (GMT+7), Lisa Randall is Twitter’s user with account @lirarandall. “Thanks to new followers. Interesting how different it feels broadcasting on line vs.via book or article. Explanations? Pithiness? Rapidity?” is her first tweet.

scholarly journals In search of America’s old covered bridges

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald G. Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Landscape

AbstractAmerica’s first documented wooden covered bridge was erected at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1805. Hundreds were constructed within two decades and at least 10,000 by the later 1800s. As settlers moved West, broad rivers were crossed with inventive structures incorporating timber trusses ingeniously developed by carpenters. Called covered bridges because of the roof and siding needed to protect the timber trusses, they became ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Over the past two centuries, most covered bridges were lost to flood, ice, arson, lightening, decay, as well as “progress,” replaced by “modern” iron, concrete, and steel spans. Of some 700 covered bridges remaining, many are mere replicas of their original forms no longer supported by timber trusses. Genuine historic bridges remain largely from the last half of the 1800s while civic boosterism has led to claims of earlier dates with often questionable authenticity. This essay presents three wooden covered bridges constructed in the 1820s along a 10-mile stretch of the Wallkill River in New Paltz, New York. Of the three, only Perrine’s Bridge, constructed first in 1821 and covered in 1822, is still standing with intact Burr timber trusses. Perrine’s is an iconic structure with exceptional heritage value because of authentic re-building and restoration in 1834, 1846, 1917, and 1968. Using documentary records, this essay establishes an accurate intertwined chronology for the three bridges, detailing nineteenth century building practices and contentious mid-twentieth century struggles pitting preservationists wanting authentic restoration against those wanting removal.

John Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 320 pp. $75.50 cloth; $25.95 paper

2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 227-229
Author(s):  
Ruth Needleman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
State University ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Growing Body

Richly descriptive and well documented, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh by John Hinshaw makes a significant contribution to the growing body of historical research on steel unionism in the twentieth century. Over the past few years, a number of new studies have broadened our understanding of unionization and work practices in the nation's steel mills, by examining in greater detail the patterns of organization in specific mills and mill towns.

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