The Brooklyn Rail

On October 11, 1948, the weather was fair in New York City. Low sixties, a moderate breeze, a waxing gibbous moon. Everyone was humming Pee Wee Hunt and His Orchestra’s “Twelfth Street Rag” and talking about John Wayne in Red River. Earlier that day, the Cleveland Indians beat the Boston Braves 4-3 to win the World Series, and New Yorkers were still riding high from the end of a terrible world war. A crowd entered the New York City Center of Music and Drama and found their seats. The 8:45pm debut performance of a brand-spanking-new company—the New York City Ballet Company—was about to begin.

On October 11, 2023, the weather was also fair in New York City. Low sixties, a fresh breeze, a waning crescent moon. Taylor Swift was topping the charts, and everyone was still talking about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie because we hadn’t had time to watch anything else since. Earlier that day, the Astros beat the Twins 3-2, but few New Yorkers cared because we were busy reading the devastating news of Israel’s offensive on Gaza. A crowd entered the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center and found their seats. At 8:00pm, NYCB’s 75th Anniversary performance would begin.

 

A Short History of NYCB

The New York City Ballet Company was actually not brand-new in 1948, not exactly. As John Martin explained to his New York Times readers, “The City Ballet is really Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Society in a new and broader phase of its activity.”

Lincoln Kirstein was a Harvard-educated writer, art critic, patron, and balletomane. He fancied himself an American Sergei Diaghilev, and in many ways he was. He just needed to find his American Michel Fokine to start his American Ballets Russes. The choreographer he found—George Balanchine—ended up not being American, though he later, very proudly, would become an American citizen.

Balanchine was born Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1904 (it was Diaghilev who later suggested the name change). After training at the Imperial Ballet School and the State Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet, he had a successful performance career before leaving Russia in 1924 to be Diaghilev’s final ballet master. After Diaghilev’s death, Balanchine tried and struggled to form his own companies. When Kirstein found him in London in 1933, it was a mutual collaborative-love-at-first sight.

Kirstein and Balanchine founded the School of American Ballet together in New York City in 1934. It was there that Balanchine hoped to create his ideal American dancers. Neither man knew exactly what the “American” style would be yet, just that it would be new.

They tried many times—both together and apart—to create successful dance companies but kept failing. Their first real success came in 1941 when two of their groups—Ballet Caravan and American Ballet—united as American Ballet Caravan for a South American tour. Then, in 1946, they formed the Ballet Society, “a nonprofit membership organization for the encouragement of the lyric theatre by the production of new works.” Balanchine was the Artistic Director, Kirstein the General Director. During one of Ballet Society’s performances at City Center, Morton Baum, the chairman of the City Center finance committee, invited them to become the Center’s first resident dance company. (At that time, there was also the New York City Opera Company, the New York City Symphony, and the New York City Theatre Company in residence.)

So, Ballet Society became New York City Ballet Company.

 

The Program, Then and Now

None of the three pieces in the debut program of October 11, 1948, were new. There were no world premieres, though Concerto Barocco (the oldest, made in 1941) was a company premiere. This year’s reenactment of the inaugural program was not new, either. The Company did the same for its 40th Anniversary. A program note from February 1989 reads: “The first night of the company’s Winter 1988 season brought these ballets together again, and, though historic, the program was in no way dated: Concerto Barocco, Orpheus and Symphony in C appeared fresh and vital.”

While “fresh” isn’t the word I would pick for the 2023 performance, it did feel vital. Balanchine’s masterpieces—and these are undoubtedly three of them—will always feel vital, because they have come to represent American Classical Ballet. They are American Classical Ballet.

The 1948 cast was made up of some demi-god Ballet Society dancers (Maria Tallchief of the Osage Nation, Manhattan-born Marie-Jeanne, Tanaquil Le Clercq from Paris, Francisco Monción from the Dominican Republic, and Nicholas Magallanes from Mexico among them) and the young students from the School of American Ballet. The 2023 cast, larger and more streamlined in comparison, had an incredibly strong corps de ballet and gifted but of-this-world principal dancers.

The 2023 audience knew what we were in for. We follow the dancers on social media. We show our support. We are forgiving but expect the best. In 1948, though, most Americans still associated ballet with Russia. If they thought of ballet at all, they thought of Fokine and Léonide Massine, of Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova. They thought of elaborate sets, pantomime, and dying swans. They didn’t know how ready they were for the stripped-down brilliance of Balanchine.

 

Concerto Barocco

Mr. B, as he was affectionately called, was a highly-trained musician born into a family of highly-trained musicians. He once famously said, “See the music and hear the dancing.” Never is this sentiment clearer than in Concerto Barocco, first performed in 1941 by American Ballet Caravan at Teatro Municipal, Rio de Janeiro on the previously mentioned South American tour.

It’s difficult to imagine, seventy-five years later, how revolutionary Balanchine’s use of musicality was. Before him, music had been merely a backdrop, a mood-setter. In his hands, music became King—the dance’s breath and heartbeat and roadmap, and the dancers’ partner. Concerto Barocco is Johann Sebastian Bach’s 1731 score of “Concerto in D minor for Two Violins” visualized. The two principal ballerinas each dance to one of the violin lines, while the corps dances the orchestra. And that’s all it is—pure dance. There is no storyline, no emotion. It is cool and precise. It is Balanchine’s ideal neoclassical ballet.

Eugene Berman designed the original scenery and costumes. The costumes looked oddly futuristic, though meant to harken back to the Baroque. And the setting, probably meant to look ornate, appeared gothic and a bit spooky. The piece wasn’t performed for several seasons, and when it came back in 1951, there was no scenery and the dancers wore only practice clothes (black, at first, then white starting in 1963). This peeling away of excess allowed the movement to shine. The 2023 version, thankfully, is still presented this way.

Of all three pieces on the program, Barocco’s choreography has changed the most over the years. Sometimes Balanchine tweaked it intentionally, as he tended to do, and sometimes the movement morphed unintentionally when dancers took on the roles, added their quirks, then passed them down. The original choreography had elements of jazz dance, both in its hippiness and syncopated rhythm, which have since faded. Also, due to variations in the musical recordings, the tempo has changed. Some sections are now danced slower or faster than in the original.

In 1948, the soloists were Marie-Jeanne, Ruth Gilbert, and Monción. Critics were enthusiastic about the choreography, but lukewarm about the performance. Many preferred the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo version from 1945, which had already dispensed with the 1941 costumes and decor.

In 2023, the soloists were Emilie Gerrity, Unity Phelan, and Andrew Veyette. The audience knew what to expect from one of Balanchine’s greatest musical-visualization ballets, and we weren’t disappointed.

 

Orpheus

Orpheus stood as the newest work on the inaugural program, but now it feels the most dated.

Heralded as one of the highlights of twentieth century art, Orpheus received mixed reviews when it premiered in 1948 (first in April by Ballet Society, then in October by NYCB). By mixed I mean critics either loved or loathed it. Following the opening, Martin wrote that it “…was the outstanding piece of the evening, as, indeed, it is also the outstanding piece of this and many other seasons.”

Others did not seem as pleased with the result of the Diaghilev-inspired collaboration between Balanchine, composer Igor Stravinsky, and artist Isamu Noguchi. While no one could find fault with Stravinsky’s beautiful score, some found Noguchi’s designs “too bizarre” and Balanchine’s gestural choreography lacking. Robert Sabin wrote that the dancers were “grotesquely costumed and provided with choreography which took one straight back to the days of Massine’s most extravagant fantasies … the underworld looked like nothing so much as a mixture of spaghetti and huge frankfurters waving from the wings.”

Over the years, critics have remained divided over Orpheus, which is best understood as a piece of modern dance theater rather than a traditional ballet. In 1979, Barton Wimble referred to Orpheus’s ascending lyre as “a dead angleworm” in the New York Daily News and complained about “the preposterous headgear that make Orpheus and the Dark Angel look like they’re getting ready to play hockey goalies.” (This was after Noguchi rescaled the designs in 1972 for the New York State Theater, now the David H. Koch Theater.)

The choreography hasn’t changed much over the past seventy-five years, except in a revision to the “Dance of the Furies” by Peter Martins in 1980. The Bacchantes section, often noted as a weak point, was a highlight when Emily Kikta led it in the current production. She was sinuous and strong, with a grand battement that could knock someone out.

The music, the same Stravinsky score, was played live just as it was in 1948.

In 1948, Orpheus was danced by Magallanes, the Dark Angel by Monción, Eurydice by Tallchief, and Apollo by Herbert Bliss. LeClercq led the Bacchantes. The 2023 cast—Joseph Gordon, Peter Walker, Ashley Laracey, and Samuel Melnikov—gave a great performance, but oh to have seen the original cast!

 

Symphony in C

In 1948, Anatole Chujoy wrote: “If there was ever any doubt that Balanchine was the greatest choreographer of our time, this doubt was dispelled when the curtain came down on Symphony in C. Here is a classic ballet that will go down in history as the finest example of this thrilling art form. Symphonic ballet at its greatest…”

Symphony in C is, indeed, thrilling. It always has been and always will be. Originally titled Le Palais de Cristal, it premiered in July 1947 at Théâtre National de l’Opéra for the Paris Opéra Ballet. Balanchine then restaged it for Ballet Society under the new title.

The classic ballet, set to Georges Bizet’s 1855 symphony of the same name, is beloved for its choreographic architecture: the geometric patterns, pleasing symmetry, and crystalline movements. It is best viewed from above. Like Barocco, it is a perfect example of abstract neoclassicism. Unlike Barocco, it exudes joy.

Not much has changed in the choreography itself since Tallchief and Magallanes, LeClercq and Monción, Marie-Jeanne and Bliss, and Jocelyn Vollmar and Todd Bolender led the dance through its four movements in 1948. The spacing has opened up, of course, to fit the Koch Theater’s stage, and some of the groupings have grown larger. While the City Center stage couldn’t accommodate the whole cast, the Koch Theater (designed to fit Balanchine’s desires) can. This makes the perfectly synchronized petit allegro of the full-cast finale even more exciting.

The main change over the years has been with the costuming. The 1947 Paris costumes, designed by Leonor Fini, shined bright and regal. Each of the movements referenced a gemstone—rubies, black diamonds, emeralds, and pearls—with the dancers wearing red, black, green, and white costumes. (Sound familiar? This idea came back in Jewels [1967]!) In 1950, NYCB started using Barbara Karinska’s simpler black-and-white costumes. In 2012, NYCB commissioned Marc Happel to design costumes that had a “more modern, yet still timeless look.” He kept the black and white color scheme, and used crystals provided by Swarovski. Even the 2023 audience, accustomed to ostentatious shows of wealth, audibly gasped at the beauty as the lights came up on the glittering dancers.

When I watched Megan Fairchild spin and flutter and Sara Mearns dive back into Tyler Angle’s arms in the first and second movements respectively, I felt the jolt of awe that audiences must have felt so long ago, and so many times since, when a truly spectacular dancer becomes something else on stage, something wholly divine, in a way that only a Balanchine ballerina can.

 

New York City Ballet, Then and Now

While the critical response to the Company’s debut performance was mixed, the audience was immediately won over. New York Star wrote: “The large audience was uncommonly enthusiastic and yelled its collective head off when Balanchine appeared on the stage with the dancers after the final curtain.” New York Journal-American noted: “By the end of the program, the audience had been whipped up to the point of an ovation.”

It took the Company a few years to find its feet, though. It lost dancers early on due to low (or nonexistent) salaries and didn’t start performing regularly until 1950. But Balanchine and Kirstein and their dancers pushed on and now, NYCB is a New York institution. It is an international institution. 

I can’t help but wonder what NYCB’s 100th anniversary will look like. Will it include Justin Peck’s work, which has revitalized the Company in recent years? Or Alexei Ratmansky’s, alongside Balanchine’s? Will there be more diversity, both in the audience and on stage? I do believe that’s what Mr. B would have wanted for the future of his innovative American company, and I hope to be there to see it.