The New York City Ballet, the country's leading dance company, has been celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year with remarkable bravura. Long known for its music festivals, the New York City Ballet outdid itself in this, its eighty-eighth season, by putting on the three-week, $3.4 million American Music Festival. Created by Peter Martins, codirector of the company with Jerome Robbins, the event celebrated not one composer but forty, with ballets by eighteen choreographers, performances by guest musicians, art by leading American painters, and twenty-one premieres. The event dominated the New York cultural scene this summer.
After forty years of existence, the company enjoys an admirable international reputation. It has its own prestigious training academy--the School of American Ballet--and while in its home city performs in the distinguished New York State Theater, designed for dance by architect Philip Johnson as part of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. If the present and future of the New York City Ballet look especially bright now, its success could not have been predicted on the basis of the company's early days.
The origins of the New York City Ballet go back to 1933, when Lincoln Kirstein invited famed Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine to come to the United States to establish a school and a company. Upon his arrival in America, Balanchine learned with shock that the proposed school and company were to be located in Hartford, Connecticut, home of the Wadsworth Atheneum, whose artistically adventurous director, A. Everett Austin, had sponsored Balanchine's immigration visa to the United States.
Foreign Ballet Master
The idea did not appeal either to Balanchine or Hartford residents. Two teachers complained in the local paper that this foreign ballet master would rob them of students, a quite likely prospect. Balanchine, who was accustomed to working in the great world capitals--Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, and Copenhagen--had no desire to bury himself in some American backwater town. He took off for New York and Kirstein hastily followed, giving up any idea of making Hartford the ballet capital of the United States.
In New York, a midtown Manhattan studio was rented at 637 Madison Avenue in a building that had once housed Isadora Duncan's studio. The School of American Ballet opened its doors in January 1934. Of the thirty-odd children who turned up, only three were boys. This imbalance was to continue for more than three decades.
Two months later, Balanchine began to create his first ballet in the United States with the seventeen young women who attended his special evening rehearsal class. He continued to work with whoever turned up each evening--including men, whenever there were any. If a woman arrived late for class, Balanchine incorporated her late entrance in the ballet, as he would a dancer's inadvertent fall. The result was Serenade, a ballet still in the company's repertoire over fifty years later.
Critical Approval
The newly formed American Ballet Company made its official debut in Hartford, and in March 1935 finally made its first appearance in New York City.
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