A Fearless Leap Into History

Oct. 6, 1962: New York City Ballet’s first visit to Russia and George Balanchine’s return to his homeland after 38 years. Mobs of Soviet officials, State Department delegates and reporters meet the plane at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. “Welcome to Russia, home of the classical ballet,” says the interviewer for Radio Moscow. “I beg your pardon,” Balanchine replies. “Russia is the home of Romantic ballet. The home of classic ballet is now America.”

That statement reverberates down the decades and seems especially resonant right now when most of the international bastions of Romantic tradition--the Royal Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Bolshoi, the Kirov--suffer from paralyzing artistic crises of one sort or another but happen to agree on one thing: the need to prove themselves modern by dancing Balanchine. Of course, New York City Ballet has also been accused of losing its grip since Balanchine’s death in 1983. But its primacy remains intact: It still fields an unmatched repertory of 20th century masterworks, and it still dances them in a distinctive manner that evolved to meet the challenge of that repertory.

The company dances some of that repertory in a weeklong engagement starting Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

In its first 50 years, the company not only Americanized ballet in ways still not fully recognized, it also helped redefine the very idea of what a ballet should be. Forget narrative and character portrayals, star showpieces or production spectacles: As much as we enjoy them, they belong to the past, the Romantic era that Balanchine mentioned. The City Ballet revolution--Balanchine’s revolution--made music visualization the cornerstone of contemporary classicism and musicality the virtue prized most in each new crop of classical dancers or choreographers.

These days, musicality and music visualization can be structural, intuitive, irreverently idiosyncratic. But, whatever path they take, they makes a key break with Romantic Franco-Russian tradition, deriving from what City Ballet co-founder Lincoln Kirstein called “a difference in the way Americans measure time, and a national discrepancy in notions of speed, pace, grace and motion.”

“Before he left Russia, Balanchine knew that the 20th century needed its own tempi, which were jazzy and syncopated. . . .” Kirstein wrote, “The New York City dancers epitomize in their quirky legginess, linear accentuation and athleticism a consciously thrown-away, improvisational style which can be read as populist, vulgar, heartless, over-acrobatic, unmannerly or insolent. It is also a style of living which may be interpreted as having small respect for its forebears--its elders and, naturally, betters.”

In his passion for irony, Kirstein may not mention that it’s also a style that became increasingly shaped by American cultural diversity, with black and Latino influences at the top of the list. Those influences have become so deeply absorbed that sometimes you notice them only when they are absent--in performances of City Ballet rep by first-rate, excellently coached foreign ensembles, for example, that lack an innate sense of swing or a certain sensual stretch. Even worse: performances that try too strenuously to project those qualities or to achieve what foreign critics once sneeringly called “l’a^me frigidaire,” but which soon became envied as “American cool.”

Obviously, no ballet choreographer ever epitomized cool more than Jerome Robbins, and his presence as a guiding spirit would have made City Ballet a major company and a force for innovation even if Balanchine weren’t Balanchine. Restlessly eclectic and a master of stylistic assimilation, he took the innovations of Antony Tudor, Agnes de Mille and others to an unprecedented level of sophistication, creating a free-floating yet potent sense of drama through sensitivity to the music and the nuances of interaction between dancers.

Together, Balanchine and Robbins defined City Ballet as a vehicle for contemporary creative expression--then a sideline for every other major classical ensemble, but dominant at City Center and, later, Lincoln Center to an extent unmatched since the heyday of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes early in the century. This emphasis gave the company’s home-grown or imported principals a different role than the stars of other companies: not the whole show but servants to something much bigger than themselves.

Indeed, the concept of star dancing began to change under the influence of City Ballet’s task-oriented virtuosi, depending less on the dancer projecting a sense of high occasion or inner fire than moving like nobody else on Earth. And as the leggy, flesh-less, small-headed City Ballet body image began to become the norm for American and later world classicism, so the company’s emphasis on functional attire--including the all-American T-shirt--grew fashionable as well.

Balanchine and Robbins each had multiple Broadway hits to their credit before City Ballet existed; afterward, they played the fame game with the media like show-biz pros who just happened to be great artists. All those magazine layouts of City Ballet women festooned with Van Cleef Arpels gems, for instance, didn’t exactly hurt the box-office prospects of Balanchine’s “Jewels”: in 1967, history’s first three-act abstract ballet and, as such, quite a risky proposition.

Starting in 1972 with the weeklong Stravinsky Festival, even more glittering, composer-driven events dramatized the City Ballet aesthetic, enlisting additional dance makers for intensive experiments in repertory expansion: 22 new works in the Stravinsky Festival alone. Four or five turned out to be masterpieces, with “Stravinsky Violin Concerto” the work that nearly everyone agreed was Balanchine at his greatest.

This achievement would have been impressive for a whole ballet season, much less one week. The company was once again taking an enormous risk to break out of the classical status quo. “George opened a window and said we were going to fly,” Robbins commented. “We just followed him.”

It’s hard to think of “The Nutcracker” as another choreographic risk, but in the early 1950s, there was no American tradition for this full-length Christmas classic, only a radically truncated version by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and the memories of a lone San Francisco Ballet staging in 1944.

For better or worse, City Ballet put “The Nutcracker” on the map, in the process ensuring the survival of many, many regional companies that fund their entire year from its box-office receipts. Moreover, after the numerous psycho-sexual, multicultural, updated and parodistic editions that have unleashed their frissons, the Balanchine “Nutcracker” looks better than ever simply because, once again, the choreography seems the perfect embodiment of the composer’s spirit.

Fifty years after the formation of New York City Ballet, former members lead many of the best regional ensembles (Helgi Tomasson in San Francisco, Kent Stowell and Francia Russell in Seattle, Edward Villella in Miami, to name the most prominent), making the company aesthetic truly national. And if some of those companies do periodically outdance the home team in this treacherous post-Balanchine, post-Kirstein and now post-Robbins era, it would be shortsighted to assume that all of City Ballet’s triumphs lie in the past. Indeed, Balanchine himself repudiated the idea of institutionalized nostalgia, of embalming the 20th century repertory the way other companies do the 19th.

“Ballet is now,” he once said, insisting that his art and company move forward--even if it left him behind.

“It wouldn’t be any good 50 years from now to do what we do now . . . ,” he said. “People will look different, they will move differently. You will ask how to preserve for posterity. I say, ‘Preserve what?’ ”

Kirstein agreed. “What happens next will be many things,” he wrote, “each needing energy to accommodate, to inspect, to discover, on new terms. . . .

“For those who are genuinely worried about the future of our company, I recommend that they watch our performers in their performances, and our repertory with its shifting casts. Watch the work of our school; worry less.”

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New York City Ballet: A Half-Century of Highlights

PRELUDE

1934: Lincoln Kirstein brings George Balanchine to America to start the School of American Ballet; Balanchine choreographs “Serenade” for his students.

1935: Balanchine and Kirstein co-found the American Ballet, a pioneer company disbanded in 1938.

1936: Kirstein founds Ballet Caravan (later American Ballet Caravan), disbanded in 1941.

1946: Balanchine and Kirstein co-found Ballet Society, which becomes New York City Ballet two years later.

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THE 50 YEARS

1948: NYCB is christened and becomes a permanent resident of the New York City Center.

1949: Jerome Robbins joins as associate artistic director.

1950: The first European tour.

1954: Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” appears--NYCB’s first full-length work and the start of an American holiday tradition.

1959: Balanchine and Martha Graham share an evening with “Episodes,” a historic meeting of ballet and modern dance. Robbins leaves to pursue independent projects.

1962: Balanchine creates the full-length “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The company makes its first Russian tour.

1963: The Ford Foundation awards the company $200,000 a year for 10 years, plus $242,500 annually to the School of American Ballet. Balanchine takes a salary for the first time.

1964: The company moves to the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center, built to Balanchine’s specifications.

1965: Balanchine’s full-evening “Don Quixote” premieres--a failed experiment, with Balanchine as the Don and favored NYCB ballerina Suzanne Farrell as Dulcinea.

1967: Balanchine’s full-evening “Jewels” premieres--the first full-evening abstract ballet, a hit.

1969: Robbins returns, choreographs the poetic masterpiece “Dances at a Gathering.”

1972: The weeklong Stravinsky Festival sets the seal on the company’s international reputation.

1974: Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova’s full-length “Coppelia” premieres--an unusual company foray into the standard repertory.

1975: A second composer festival, dedicated to Ravel, is a surprise--not a composer normally much in evidence in the repertory.

1981: The Tchaikovsky Festival offers one more single composer tribute.

1983: Balanchine dies; Robbins and Danish dancer Peter Martins share company direction.

1990: Martins becomes sole director.

1993: The Balanchine Festival comes a decade after his death.

1996: Kirstein dies.

1998: Robbins dies; the company stages a yearlong 50th anniversary celebration full of historic revivals and a number of touring plans.