Better still, ballet was virgin territory, a European tradition yet to find an American voice. This too dovetailed with Kirstein’s biography: his strong New England roots, European heritage, and youthful forays to London and Paris—the expatriate Paris of the 1920s—had given him a dual identity, and he naturally hoped to span the Atlantic gap. Ballet became the project he so urgently needed to give his life shape and purpose, and he began to see himself as a new Diaghilev: if the Russian impresario had returned classical ballet to Europe and in the process revolutionized the art, Kirstein would carry it across to America and make the New World ballet’s next vanguard.
When Kirstein and Balanchine finally met in London in 1933, the pieces began to fall into place. Kirstein was urgently seeking a choreographer to bring to America (he had already unsuccessfully tried Léonide Massine), and Balanchine—discouraged by the lack of opportunity in Europe and feeling lonely and dispirited—was open to new possibilities. Thus the heightened tone in Kirstein’s sixteen-page letter to his friend Chick Austin that year, begging for support to help bring Balanchine to America: “This is the most important letter I will ever write you … my pen burns my hand as I write.…We have a real chance to have an American ballet within 3 years time. When I say ballet, I mean a trained company of young dancers—not Russians—but Americans with Russian stars to start with. We have the future in our hands. For Christ’s sweet sake let us honor it.”14
Balanchine came, but he and Kirstein did not have an American ballet within three years. Indeed, for over a decade they would struggle, together and separately, to establish a foothold for a modern ballet in the United States. They did, however, successfully establish a school in New York in 1934: the School of American Ballet (SAB). Its staff and teachers were mostly Russians, but from the very beginning SAB was different from the other émigré schools dotted around the country. Balanchine envisioned a mixed student body of “whites” and “negros”: he was fascinated with black performers (he had worked in Paris with Josephine Baker) and admired their “suppleness” and “sense of time … they have so much abandon—and discipline.” And although he did not succeed in creating a racial mix (the school, with few exceptions, was lily white), his interest in African American culture was genuine and ongoing.15
The school’s faculty and curriculum were unusually broad. By the early 1940s there were classes in folk dance and in contemporary technique, introducing students (Kirstein notwithstanding) to the ideas of Martha Graham and Mary Wigman. The English dancer Muriel Stuart, who had performed with Pavlova and with German expressionist choreographers, taught plastique as well as ballet, and the African American dancer Janet Collins later taught modern dance. In addition to dancing there were also courses in the history of dance, music, and movement analysis.
Establishing a company, however, proved harder. They began with the American Ballet in 1935, but funding was difficult. Kirstein lavished his own resources and worked tirelessly to raise money: he used his contacts, cajoled friends and family, scrimped, and borrowed, but the losses were nonetheless daunting. The company briefly took shelter at the Metropolitan Opera, though that too failed. Balanchine’s work was too radical for the conservative Met board: in his Orpheus and Eurydice (1936) hell was a forced labor camp and Paradise a planetary celestial order; the sets by Pavel Tchelitchew—a tangle of chicken wire, dead branches, and cheesecloth—were disturbingly ugly and claustrophobic. Critics and patrons hated the work, and although Balanchine held on for a while, he was eventually fired.
There were practical problems as well. Balanchine had a Nansen passport, issued by the League of Nations for stateless individuals, and no right to remain permanently in the United States. He would have been forced to return to Europe in 1934, but Kirstein, fearing his entire project might collapse, rushed to Washington, D.C., and used family connections to arrange papers for the choreographer, who eventually became a U.S. citizen in 1940. Balanchine’s poor health was another constant worry. He had already lost a lung to tuberculosis, and soon after his arrival in the United States he suffered bouts of weakness and fever. On one occasion he collapsed into an uncontrolled fit, and when the doctors diagnosed possible meningitis, epilepsy, or tuberculosis of the brain, Kirstein frantically rushed the ballet master to specialists, ordered tests, and arranged for retreats and rest in the countryside.
Artistically, matters were no easier. Kirstein was one of several American visionaries keen to make ballet American by producing works on American themes by American choreographers, writers, and composers; he pressed Balanchine to make ballets about sports (the ballet master refused), and in 1936 Kirstein briefly went his own way and established a small touring company, Ballet Caravan, sinking thousands of dollars into the enterprise. He enlisted dancers from the School of American Ballet and talented young choreographers such as Lew Christiansen (a Mormon from Utah) and Eugene Loring (son of a saloon keeper in Wisconsin) to work with Aaron Copland and Elliot Carter, among others. He commissioned ballet scenarios from James Agee and E. E. Cummings (“I felt we needed our own Cocteau”) and wrote several of his own, including one about Pocahontas. The result was a series of fresh and entertaining but choreographically thin dances such as Billy the Kid, Yankee Clipper, and (in an almost comic-book style) Filling Station: ballet as American folklore.16
Balanchine, meanwhile, went to Broadway where, ironically, he made more American dances than Kirstein’s company ever managed. Balanchine choreographed over a dozen Broadway hits, including The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, Cabin in the Sky, and Where’s Charley? In 1938 he went to Hollywood and staged dances for (among other films) The Goldwyn Follies, On Your Toes, I Was an Adventuress, and—to entertain the troops—Star Spangled Rhythm and Follow the Boys. In these years he collaborated with a dizzying array of artists—many of them fellow European émigrés—including Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Frank Loesser, and George and Ira Gershwin. He made dances for Josephine Baker, Ray Bolger, and the Nicholas Brothers (tap dancers from Harlem; Balanchine was sure they had had ballet training, but they assured him it was not so). He also befriended and worked with the anthropologist and modern dancer Katherine Dunham. He admired, perhaps above all, Fred Astaire, whose uncanny mix of aristocratic ease and all-American directness had enormous appeal. Balanchine plowed his money and ideas back into his more serious work, but the dream of establishing a viable ballet company seemed increasingly remote. Popular and commercial culture were swallowing his time and talent.
The Second World War opened new opportunities. In 1941, as part of his foreign policy, President Roosevelt asked Nelson Rockefeller to spearhead efforts to improve relations with South America. Rockefeller approached Kirstein, a close friend, and with the help of the State Department, Kirstein and Balanchine pooled resources—dancers, repertory, ideas—and organized a touring company to represent the United States abroad. They called it American Ballet Caravan. On tour in Rio de Janeiro Balanchine created one of his greatest ballets, Concerto Barocco, to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in D, among other dances. The troupe did not last, but an important turn had been taken. For a moment, ballet had ceased to be merely a private or commercial venture; it had become a matter of state.
In 1943 Kirstein enlisted. He served as a driver and interpreter for General Patton’s Third Army and later worked to recover paintings and other works of art stolen and hidden by the Nazis. Digging through the rubble and destruction, he saw firsthand the immense losses and devastation of the war. This left a lasting impression, as did the discipline and precision of military life, which reminded him of ballet (he liked to call SAB the “West Point of dance”). When he got home ballet seemed more important than ever, but the idea of pressing dance into a national mold—those prewar Pocahontas ballets—suddenly appeared quaintly irrelevant. This was a grand European tradition and a key piece of the civilization shattered by the war: like the paintings and artifacts he had salvaged, ballet too needed to be recovered. He and Balanchine r
econvened and formed yet another company: Ballet Society. This one, however, would last.
Europe was also much on the mind of New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia. La Guardia’s parents were Italian immigrants, and as a young man he himself had lived and worked in Budapest, Trieste, and Fiume. He spoke several languages, including Italian, German, French, and Yiddish (his mother was Jewish), and had a lifelong interest in music. La Guardia wanted New York to have theater, music, and dance on a par with the great European cities, and he wanted them to be affordable and accessible to working people. To this end, in 1943 the city turned an old Shriners meeting hall on 55th Street into a performing arts center, financed by wealthy New Yorkers but also by trade unions. They called it the City Center for Music and Drama.
City Center’s Finance Committee was chaired by Morton Baum, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the son of immigrant Jews. Baum shared La Guardia’s vision and, working with the mayor and others, made City Center a place where immigrants imbued with the culture of the old world could enjoy the arts: tickets were cheap and performances were early to suit the needs of working people. In 1948 Kirstein rented the theater for a series of Ballet Society performances. Baum was in the audience and immediately recognized Balanchine’s talent. He invited Ballet Society to become City Center’s resident dance company: the New York City Ballet.
Thus NYCB was not only born of Balanchine’s choreographic genius: indeed, for over a decade that had not been enough. It took a generation of political leaders with strong ties to Europe and a desire to build culture and the arts in America; it took the Second World War, which brought government into the business of culture and, perhaps most important of all, created a new sense of idealism and urgency that inspired men like Kirstein and Baum. But it would take more than all of this to sustain the company. Funding was unreliable, and although NYCB was officially in residence at City Center, this was no guarantee of survival: audiences were slow to develop and Kirstein continued to pour his inheritance into the company’s coffers and to frantically raise cash (he even mortgaged his town house) to plug holes in its finances. In these years Balanchine never took a salary: he supported himself instead through his work on Broadway, and in 1952 apparently even considered selling Vespa motor scooters to cover his costs.
NYCB’s troubles were not unique. Ballet Theatre had similar problems. In the 1940s it too performed to half-empty houses and sustained serious losses that forced it to fold briefly on several occasions. And although both companies depended on private patronage, their real guardian angel—the thing that finally lifted them from the constant threat of bankruptcy—was the U.S. government. Ballet Theatre went to London in 1946 and toured the Continent in 1950 and again in 1953 under the auspices of the State Department. The dancers traveled in army buses and transport planes and stayed in air force barracks. This was only the beginning: in the course of the 1950s and ’60s the company toured forty-two countries on four different continents, including (in 1960) the USSR. The dancers were hardly ever at home—and when they were, they were not in New York but playing cities and small towns across the country instead. Ballet Theatre averaged a mere twelve performances annually in Manhattan.
New York City Ballet had longer home seasons—up to three months by the mid-1950s—but it too depended on government-supported European tours. Balanchine’s work was well known abroad, and his (and Kirstein’s) European contacts and orientation paid off. But there was more to it than that. Balanchine despised the USSR and saw himself as an ambassador for his adoptive country: in 1947 he wrote to Kirstein from Paris (where he was guest ballet master at the Paris Opera) reporting hopefully that a ranking UNESCO representative had attended performances of Serenade and Apollo and had inquired about a dance company that might “represent America” abroad. “I could represent America,” Balanchine commented sardonically to Kirstein, “in [sic] artistic way better than ice boxes or electric bathtubs can.”17
And so he did. In the course of the 1950s, NYCB spent several months in Europe on an almost annual basis, and even went as far afield as Japan, Australia, and the Middle East. These were Cold War tours. In 1952, for example, the State Department and the U.S. Army High Commission in Germany helped to sponsor the company at the Berlin Festival. Balanchine reported back to President Eisenhower that he had “just returned with the New York City Ballet from an extensive tour of Europe, ending in Berlin where we went at the request of the State Department … Europe is only beginning to realize that America can produce great art.” (He also pledged his vote: “You are the man to lead this country in its fight against Communism.”) These tours were also a sign of Balanchine’s enduring connection to the Continent; Morton Baum scrawled in his notes, “Balanchine loved Europe.” Indeed, his dances were in such demand there that in 1959 Balanchine proposed that they be distributed through a lend-lease-type program overseen by the State Department Bureau of International Cultural Relations.18
Back home, building audiences for ballet took more work. This meant fund-raising, but it also meant teaching the public how to see ballet—and, above all, convincing them that it mattered. Kirstein published dozens of books and articles about dance and laid the foundation for a critical and historical appreciation of the art, but it was Balanchine who led the way. Contrary to a popular myth that portrays him as a sphinxlike figure loath to discuss his art, Balanchine worked very hard to bring dance to the public eye. Especially in the early years, he gave generous interviews, wrote articles, staged lecture-demonstrations, had tea with Jackie at the White House (he drank scotch), and posed for countless arty publicity photos (in the 1960s he appeared flanked by glamorous miniskirted dancers half his age). He portrayed (and saw) himself as an everyman—a craftsman and circus entertainer, gardener, and carpenter, not some fancy intellectual or highbrow artist. He admired Stravinsky and Pushkin, but he also loved TV Westerns, Jack Benny, and fast cars. Deliberately or otherwise, he tapped into a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American culture—he brought ballet down to common folk, even while he also worked to bring them up to his more demanding and radical dances.
Balanchine and his dancers also took advantage of the explosion in media—glossy magazines, TV, film—to spread their art: CBS television broadcast La Valse in 1951 and seven years later beamed The Nutcracker, with Balanchine as Drosselmeyer, into thousands of suburban homes. The ballet was very Russian, but it was also “brought to you by Kimberly-Clark,” with June Lockhart presiding, and inadvertently fed into popular 1950s hearth and home ideals: the Sugar Plum Fairy, danced by the ballerina Diana Adams with hair drawn demurely back, looked the perfect 1950s mother. The Bell Telephone Hour also broadcast Balanchine’s dances, and NYCB dancers were featured guests on the ever-popular Ed Sullivan Show. On one show Sullivan asked the dancers Edward Villella and Patricia McBride where they were from. They responded, to audience cheers, Bayside, Queens, and Teaneck, New Jersey.
Behind this populism, however, lay a serious purpose. Balanchine wanted nothing less than to build a new civic culture in America. In 1952 he wrote to Kirstein, explaining that it was vital to have free performances of ballet, drama, and opera for children: “The new generation which would come to the performances will be the future citizens of the United States.…We have to do something for their souls and minds.” Or as he later put it in an interview in which he complained about the country’s rampant commercialism, “Nobody advertises soul. Nobody even mentions it, and that’s what we lack.” “You see,” he went on,
the power of admiring things, which exists, is lost because everybody is doing it on his own and for nothing. Every once in a while people agree. We meet and we say, “Do you see that little flower? How beautiful it is.” “Yes, I see.” Well, let us be people who look at flowers together. Let us have a million people saying that a rose is a beautiful shade of pink. There must be organization and agreement between all of us who love beautiful things. And when fifty million people will say loudly, “I love this beautiful thing” the po
wer will be there.19
To this end, Balanchine gave his ballets away—free, like flowers—to regional companies and worked to create programs to spread dance, initiating, for example, a program of lecture-demonstrations in the New York City Public Schools. But the real push came first in 1954 with The Nutcracker, which was a box office hit. Then in 1963 the Ford Foundation gave an astonishing $7,756,000 to NYCB, the School of American Ballet, and five smaller companies nationwide to help build professional standards in classical ballet. The foundation’s director of humanities and the arts was W. McNeil Lowry, like Kirstein, Baum, and La Guardia a devoted public servant who believed in making elite art, with the highest possible standards, accessible to the people. In anticipation of the grant, Lowry had asked Balanchine to tour the country to assess the state of dance, and the two men worked closely to develop a national program, which would link SAB and NYCB to local schools and communities across the country. There were training programs for teachers, scouts to promote young talent, and scholarships to study in New York. It was a hugely ambitious project, inspired by Balanchine—but also, and not least, by Cold War competition and the Russian example. It was no accident that the grant came just four years after the Bolshoi Ballet’s first-ever tour to New York, amid widespread discussion of the “Soviet advantage” in state funding for the performing arts.
In 1964, thanks in large measure to Kirstein’s friendship with Nelson Rockefeller, NYCB moved from City Center to the newly minted Lincoln Center. Kirstein and Balanchine worked closely with the architect Philip Johnson on the plans for their new home: the New York State Theater. Balanchine wanted something practical but elegant with clear, clean lines and large, welcoming public spaces. The idea was to create a lively and festive theater, grand in spirit but with none of the old hierarchies (such as box seats) and gilt pretensions that characterized so many European opera houses. In the same key, Morton Baum, whose involvement was ongoing, fought hard to keep full control of the house: he wanted low ticket prices and high artistic standards, and he adamantly resisted those who wished to run the State Theater as a purely commercial enterprise. This theater would be dedicated, as Balanchine had put it, to “doing something for [people’s] souls.”
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