George Balanchine was the most influential choreographer of classical ballet in the United States in the 20th century. His works, characterized by a cool neoclassicism, include The Nutcracker (1954) and Don Quixote (1965), both pieces choreographed for the New York City Ballet, of which he was a founder (1948), the artistic director, and the chief choreographer. He was also a pioneer in choreography for film and musical theatre.
George Balanchine was one of a generation of dancers who spent the World War I years at the Imperial School of Ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre. The theatre closed for some months in 1917, and, until the Imperial School reopened in 1918 as the Soviet State School of Ballet, he had to support himself with unskilled jobs or by playing piano in a cinema. After three more years of study, he graduated. He was the son of a composer, and he also studied music at the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Conservatory (1921–1924).
As a student, Balanchine had already tried choreography. His first work, as early as 1920, was a short piece danced to Anton Rubinstein’s Nuit.
Balanchine was one of the first ballet dancers to leave the Soviet Union, initially to tour with a small group, the Soviet State Dancers. They toured Germany, London, and Paris, where in June 1925 he joined Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
It was as a choreographer that Diaghilev envisaged Balanchine, and in 1925 the Ballets Russes danced Balanchine’s Barabau, the first of 10 ballets Balanchine was to mount for Diaghilev. When Diaghilev died in 1929, Balanchine worked successively with the Royal Danish Ballet and with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In 1933 he was one of the founders of the avant-garde company Les Ballets 1933, whose work so enormously impressed the American dance enthusiast Lincoln Kirstein that he invited Balanchine to organize the School of American Ballet and the American Ballet company (of which Kirstein was co-founder and director), thus beginning ballet in the United States.
The American Ballet became the resident ballet company at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City; however, the end of the largely unsatisfactory association between the two came in 1938. During the World War II period, Balanchine worked in the United States for the Original Ballet Russe, for Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, and in Hollywood or on Broadway.
Kirstein was determined, however, to establish American ballet under Balanchine’s artistic direction. In 1946 he founded the Ballet Society, which developed in 1948 into the New York City Ballet. First based at the New York City Center and later at the New York State Theatre at Lincoln Center, this company became particularly identified with Balanchine. A prolific creator in various styles, he was responsible for most of the New York City Ballet’s extensive repertoire, having created more than 150 works for the company. He continued as artistic director and ballet master of the New York Ballet until late in 1982, when ill health forced him to relinquish his duties.
Although he worked mainly in the United States, Balanchine was an international choreographer, and almost every leading ballet company in the world has mounted at least one of his ballets. Best known abroad are his interpretations of musical compositions, either in a serious vein, such as Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer (1960), or broadly comic, such as Hershy Kay’s Western Symphony (1954), or richly Romantic, such as Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze (1980).
Source: Britannica