No festival on St. Petersburg culture would be complete without a program devoted to dance and the extraordinary tradition of that city's Imperial Russian (later Kirov) Ballet housed at the Mariinsky Theatre. St. Petersburg trained dancers have transformed the world of dance not only in Russia but also throughout Europe and America.

There is no better way to appreciate this legacy than through exploration of the life and work of the most influential of the Mariinsky alumni, George Balanchine. Balanchine has been compared to Shakespeare in the depth and scope of his work and ranks with Picasso and Stravinsky as a titan of 20th-century arts. By fusing his St. Petersburg dance training and cultural heritage with American popular dance and culture, Balanchine revolutionized ballet and ballet technique, and transformed the face of American—and subsequently world—dance. He founded a new modern ballet company, the New York City Ballet, and created innovative dances for a new kind of American classical dancer, including the first internationally known Native American ballerina, Maria Tallchief. He helped break the color barrier in classical ballet by creating works for the African American dancer, Arthur Mitchell. By the end of his career, he had created a repertoire of modern ballets unparalleled in the 20th century.

Balanchine's innovations were built on his St. Petersburg experience, and he drew inspiration from Russian culture all of his life. Balanchine spent his formative years training in St. Petersburg at the Imperial Ballet School and dancing at the Mariinsky Theatre. His first appearance, as a child on stage in Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, inspired him to become a choreographer. His love of Tchaikovsky infused many of his major American ballets. As a student, he lived through the Russian Revolution and experienced the tumultuous changes that it brought to Russian arts, including the innovative choreography of Goleizovsky and Lopukhov, whom he admired.

At the age of 20, Balanchine left Russia for Europe where he joined St. Petersburg impresario Serge Diaghilev and began a life long association with Igor Stravinsky, who provided the scores for many of his ballets. After the death of Diaghilev, he came to America where he changed the face of American ballet training with the establishment of the School of American Ballet, modeled in part on the Russian Imperial Ballet (later Vaganova) School and staffed, in part, by St. Petersburg trained teachers.

The establishment of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet marked the fulfillment of Balanchine's ambition to create an America a major ballet company and feeder school on the Mariinsky model. Balanchine's students, imbued with this heritage, went on to lead similar companies and schools in Miami, San Francisco, the Pacific Northwest, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Chicago, including the African American classical company and school, The Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Balanchine's contributions were not limited to ballet. He made seminal contributions to American popular culture through American film and the Broadway stage by collaborating with, among others, Ira Gershwin, Vernon Duke, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart. He worked with great African American dancers like Harold and Fayard Nicholas, Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham. He brought these experiences to bear on his creation of a unique fusion of ballet and American jazz dance but never abandoned his training and heritage in St. Petersburg, using it as the foundation to create what is now considered a truly American art form.

Symposium Themes

Organized in collaboration with Beth Genné, associate professor of dance and art history, Peter Sparling, professor of dance, and others, this symposium examines the many facets of George Balanchine's life and art. The University Musical Society is contributing to this dance component of the St. Petersburg Festival by inviting the Suzanne Farrell Ballet and Miami City Ballet (whose artistic directors, Suzanne Farrell and Edward Villella, were trained by Balanchine) to perform in Ann Arbor in October 2003.

To complement the performances, we have invited leading internationally recognized scholars to participate in a symposium to discuss and analyze Balanchine's work and influences from a variety of perspectives, and to consider its impact in both Russia and the United States. The Suzanne Farrell Ballet and Miami City Ballet performances under UMS auspices will afford the opportunity to review the evolution of Balanchine's vision of a new ballet.

Just as important, the symposium will make "visible" the fusion of Russian and American culture embodied in Balanchine's work by providing a prestigious forum within which to begin a scholarly dialogue about his work. Balanchine, as well as the art form of dance in general, has been neglected within the world of academe, creating a significant lacuna in our accounts of the history of arts in the 20th century. Scholars of Russian and American culture need to be aware of Balanchine's crucial contribution and to integrate him and his legacy into their investigations of the tapestry of American, European, and Russian cultural life. Students, faculty, dance aficionados, and the community of southeastern Michigan and beyond will thus have the opportunity to appreciate and contextualize Balanchine's works within a culturally rich array of St. Petersburg arts programs featured in this ambitious and uniquely University of Michigan-sponsored series.

Related Links

The George Balanchine Foundation
George Balanchine Biography (New York City Ballet)
Mariinsky Theatre
The Kirov Ballet
Dance Theater of Harlem
Suzanne Farrell Ballet
Miami City Ballet
New York City Ballet

For further information on the Balanchine Symposium, contact:
Center for Russian and East European Studies
Suite 4668 School of Social Work Building
1080 S. University Ave.
734.764.0351
crees@umich.edu

Photo by Jack Kollmann © 2003