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).

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Ford Foundation ◽  
Christmas Tree ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
The World ◽  
American Children ◽  
Classical Ballet

AT CHRISTMASTIME ACROSS America, hundreds of nonprofit companies mount performances of The Nutcracker, the Franco-Russian ballet originally choreographed by Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa in 1892 to music composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The Russian emigré George Balanchine reinterpreted the ballet for American audiences in 1954, centering it around a magically growing Christmas tree, with spectacular success. Broadcast nationwide by CBS in 1957 and 1958, performances by Balanchine’s New York City Ballet introduced millions of American children and adults to the world of classical ballet. In recognition of its achievement, the Ford Foundation awarded the company $6 million in 1963, enabling a bigger and more lavish production of ...

Jack Kirby

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-205
Author(s):  
Andrew Alan Smith
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Real World ◽  
York City ◽  
Background Information ◽  
East Side ◽  
Alter Ego

Ben “The Thing” Grimm of the Fantastic Four is portrayed as a working-class “guy,” despite the vast amount of money at his disposal as a principal in Fantastic Four, Inc. However, his origins go back further than his first appearance in 1961, to the childhood of his co-creator and original artist, Jack Kirby. Kirby, a working-class Jew from the slums of Lower East Side New York City in the early part of the twentieth century, patterned Grimm after himself. Even after both Kirby and cocreator Stan Lee left Fantastic Four, successive writers and artists would include new pieces of background information about the character cementing the direct correlation between the fictional Thing and his real-world creator and alter ego, Jack Kirby.

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) .

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.

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.

Aftershocks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seva Gunitsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
International System ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sudden Rise ◽  
The World ◽  
National Borders

Over the past century, democracy spread around the world in turbulent bursts of change, sweeping across national borders in dramatic cascades of revolution and reform. This book offers a new global-oriented explanation for this wavelike spread and retreat—not only of democracy but also of its twentieth-century rivals, fascism, and communism. The book argues that waves of regime change are driven by the aftermath of cataclysmic disruptions to the international system. These hegemonic shocks, marked by the sudden rise and fall of great powers, have been essential and often-neglected drivers of domestic transformations. Though rare and fleeting, they not only repeatedly alter the global hierarchy of powerful states but also create unique and powerful opportunities for sweeping national reforms—by triggering military impositions, swiftly changing the incentives of domestic actors, or transforming the basis of political legitimacy itself. As a result, the evolution of modern regimes cannot be fully understood without examining the consequences of clashes between great powers, which repeatedly—and often unsuccessfully—sought to cajole, inspire, and intimidate other states into joining their camps.

Battlefields from Event to Heritage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
War And Conflict ◽  
Modern War

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.

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