Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

First comprehensive history of Balanchine's early years in the United States
Highlights Balanchine's contributions to opera, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood film
Offers fresh insights into Kirstein's personal and professional relationship with Balanchine

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

Description

In 1933 choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein embarked on an elusive quest to found a ballet company and school in the United States. Though their efforts would eventually result in the creation of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, the first decade of their collaborative efforts was anything but assured. Tracing the tangled histories of two of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise offers a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in cultural history. Deeply researched using sources only made available in recent years, the book challenges the mythologies surrounding the early years of the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise. It also reveals the full extent of Kirstein's essential role and offers reconstructive analysis of lost works, as well as new and surprising details regarding some of Balanchine's most iconic ballets, including Serenade, Apollo, and Concerto Barocco. This history involved artists including Richard Rodgers, Martha Graham, George Gershwin, Katherine Dunham, Vera Zorina, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as dozens of lesser known players whose contributions have yet to be fully acknowledged.

Capturing the full sweep of Balanchine and Kirstein's collaborative work across multiple genres and institutions, this book reveals their partnership in all of its exciting and ungainly complexity, showing how the 1930s Balanchine was not the artist that he would eventually become, and how the same was true of the institutions that he and Kirstein jointly created.

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

Author Information

James Steichen grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and attended the University of Virginia and University of Chicago before completing a PhD in musicology from Princeton University. Prior to his doctoral studies he worked for five years in the development office at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he currently serves as Director of Individual Gifts at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

Reviews and Awards

Named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

"Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise does exactly what an excellent, archivally rooted book should: it invites new connections, opens avenues for interpretation, and raises questions to be taken up elsewhere." -- Sophie Benn, Journal of the Society for American Music

"...a richly researched and gracefully written book on the tangled origins of the New York City Ballet and its associated School of American Ballet." -- Modernism/modernity

"Steichen's book not only provides new insight into Balanchine but also provokes readers to think more critically about the role of institutions and the contingencies of history in shaping artistic legacies." -- Theatre Survey

"...the writing style is welcoming and the research is excellent. Summing up: Highly Recommended" -- CHOICE

"Of all the performing arts, dance may be the most difficult to reconstruct. This is true, too, for the metaphorical dance between Kirstein and Balanchine, requiring the artful stitching together of memoirs, diaries, correspondence, newspaper reviews and occasional photographs. Steichen connects the dots, reads between the lines and offers up what should become the standard account of the complex personal and institutional dynamics that drove the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise." -- Twentieth-Century Music

"...beautifully written, and full of well-researched information and perceptive insights." -- Dance Chronicle

"Well-written and deeply researched, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise challenges at almost every turn received wisdom about Balanchine's first decade in the United States and the nature of his relationship with Lincoln Kirstein. It is the first book focused on Kirstein's ballet activities to make full use of his diaries and letters, to comb the contemporary press, to view Balanchine's popular enterprises in tandem with his 'high art' ones, and to consider those enterprises, along with Kirstein's, within the broader context of ballet in the 1930s." -- Lynn Garafola, Professor Emerita of Dance, Barnard College

"This book dramatically widens our understanding of the birth of American-style ballet in the 1930s, by looking equally at the usual hero, Balanchine, and at his younger partner and fellow-dreamer, Lincoln Kirstein. Steichen's meticulous examination of the two men's often self-contradictory 'enterprise' offers the pleasures of great scholarship - freshness, transparency, intelligence - coupled with exhilarating prose." -- Elizabeth Kendall, author of Balanchine & the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

James Steichen

From Our Blog

George Balanchine: mythology and reality

There are few choreographers with more influence in the world of ballet than George Balanchine. Over three decades after his death, his ballets are performed somewhere on the planet virtually every day. Two prominent dance institutions continue his legacy'the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet'and dancers who worked alongside him lead important companies and schools across America from Miami to Seattle.

Posted on November 16, 2018

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