George Balanchine Essay -- Choreographer Art Ballet Essays

George Balanchine If composers are the masters of time, then the choreographer George Balanchine is the master of visual realization of that time in human terms. A master in both the kinesthetic and musical frames of creativity, he did not devote his energies to music visualization by assigning a certain number of dancers to represent strings, others the brass, and still others woodwinds or percussion but by creating a visual analogy in space that restates the musical structure with the trained dancer's body. He claimed that "Ballet... should not be an illustrator of even...the most substantive of literary sources. It will speak for itself. The ballet is flowers, beauty, poetry...I am, if you please, an advocate of pure art." Balanchine's most intense desire was "to make audiences see music and hear dancing." Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze was born the second of three children to Meliton Balanchivadze and his wife Marie on January 22,1904 in the village of Banodzha in western Georgia. His older sister was named Tamara and his younger brother, Andrei. Georgi was a very reserved child and never showed his emotions. When he was punished he would hide, afraid someone would see him crying. When translated, balanchivadze means "jester's son", which always amused Balanchine because his father was a singer and composer, and his mother was a pianist who encouraged the musical development of her children. When Meliton was home from his many tours and study trips he would teach the children to sing, and all three of them took piano lessons. At parties Andrei and Tamara would often dance for the guests but Georgi refused because he hated anything to do with dance and performance. When she reached the official age for admitt... ... companies perform at least one Balanchine work. Upon his death, it was written in the New York Review of Books that "George Balanchine liked to say, quoting Mayakovsky, 'I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers.' And now that luminous cloud has floated off, leaving us with a loss far deeper than the grave." Works Cited: A Ballet Society Book. Portraits of Mr. B: Photographs of George Balanchine. New York: The Viking Press, 1984. Buckle, Richard. George Balanchine: Ballet Master. New York: Random House, 1988. Flatow, Sheryl. "The Balanchine Trust: Guardian of the Legacy". Dance Magazine. December 1990, p 58-61. McDonagh, Don. George Balanchine. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Reynolds, Nancy. "Balanchine in the USSR: Cultural Revelation". Dance Magazine. January 1994, p 88-90. Taper, Bernard. Balanchine: A Biography. New York: Times Books, 1984.