George Balanchine summary

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George Balanchine, orig. Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze, (born Jan. 22, 1904, St. Petersburg, Russia—died April 30, 1983, New York, N.Y., U.S.), Russian-born U.S. choreographer. After studying at the Imperial Ballet School, he left the Soviet Union in 1925 to join the Ballets Russes, where his choreography of Apollo (1928) exemplified the spare neoclassical style that became his trademark. His work impressed the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who in 1933 invited “Mr. B.” to form the School of American Ballet and its performing group, the American Ballet. The group became the Metropolitan Opera’s resident company (1935–38) but disbanded in 1941. In 1946 Kirstein and Balanchine founded the Ballet Society, from which emerged the New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine created more than 150 works for the company, including The Nutcracker (1954), Don Quixote (1965), and Jewels (1967), and he also choreographed musicals and operas. He collaborated closely with the composer Igor Stravinsky, setting more than 30 works to his music. Balanchine’s work remains in the repertoires of many companies worldwide, and he is widely considered the greatest choreographer of the 20th century.

choreography Summary

Choreography, the art of creating and arranging dances. The word derives from the Greek for “dance” and for “write.” In the 17th and 18th centuries, it did indeed mean the written record of dances. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, the meaning shifted, inaccurately but universally, while the

directing Summary

Directing, the craft of controlling the evolution of a performance out of material composed or assembled by an author. The performance may be live, as in a theatre and in some broadcasts, or it may be recorded, as in motion pictures and the majority of broadcast material. The term is also used in

ballet Summary

Ballet, theatrical dance in which a formal academic dance technique—the danse d’école—is combined with other artistic elements such as music, costume, and stage scenery. The academic technique itself is also known as ballet. This article surveys the history of ballet. Ballet traces its origins to

film Summary

Film, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement. (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film