dance
BY RACHAEL CARNES
Who Cares about
Balanchine?
Eugene Ballet Company
Balanchine / May Dances / Silk and Steel
8 pm Saturday, April 19; 2:30 pm Sunday, April 20
Hult Center • www.hultcenter.org 682-5000 • $18-$42
M
y sniffy dance profs back in
college didn’t have much good
to say about George Balanchine:
“He used to make women hold cigarettes
between their thighs to show how good
their turnout was.”
It was the late ’80s, and we reveled in
the amorphous noodling of the dance era:
Exploring our feeeeeeelings, making pieces
with social and emotional relevance and
more often than not, using costumes and or
props that harkened back to some distant,
pre-war past. There’s a whole canon of
work like this in the Pacifi c Northwest:
Complicated, introverted, angry “girl” dance.
We thought we were so hip, but wasn’t the
reliance on narrative and dramatics a little
dated? And after soaking it up for 15 years,
I have to tell you, I love Balanchine. Line,
form and music: That’s all you need.
Set to ticklers by George Gershwin (‘S
Wonderful, The Man I Love, Embraceable
You), the Eugene Ballet Company’s new piece
“Who Cares,” by Balanchine himself, tips its
hat to Broadway’s heyday. The sturdy jazz
standards still sound bright and optimistic and
serve as the riff for a lovers’ quartet.
Balanchine was perhaps the most important
KENT PETERSEN
The Eugene Ballet
Company recalibrates
weary eyes
contributor to ballet in the 20th century. He
was born in Russia in 1904, and his lifetime
achievement built the bridge between classical
and modern ballet. Imagine if visual art or
theater had never moved past the coquettish
narrative, the “artifi ce” of imagination, and
into the realistic, stripped-down style we’ve
grown accustomed to. In ballet, it was
Balanchine who pulled away the frilly tutus,
the contrived plots, the gimmicky theatrics to
reveal the ballet lexicon for what it could be:
Multidimensional painting, with bodies as the
stuff of artistry.
Little Georgi Balanchivadze, in Saint
Petersburg, discovered dancing at 9 years
old, only to have his school disbanded by
the Bolsheviks.
But an artist has to eat, and Balanchine
got to busking as a piano player in cabarets
and silent movies. When the Imperial Ballet
School reopened in 1921, Balanchine re-
enrolled there while simultaneously pursuing
a music degree. (Look at our most favored
and long-lasting choreographers: What do
they have in common? Music. Mark Morris,
Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, Garth
Fagan. They understand music.)
But let’s imagine young Georgi, when
ballet master Serge Diaghilev invites the
20-year-old to join his Ballets Russes
in France, prompting him and others to
defect. (Had that not happened, there would
probably not be a Eugene Ballet Company).
As company master for the Ballets Russes
(a great documentary of the same name is
available — lots of fun), Balanchine created
nine ballets and suffered a performance-
ending knee injury.
After a tumult following Diaghilev’s
death, the Ballets Russes settled in Monte
Carlo (wouldn’t you?), and Balanchine took
the helm. During this period, Balanchine
collaborated with the likes of Bertolt Brecht
and Kurt Weill. Anti-authoritarian rhetoric and
ballet? Really? I wish I could have seen it.
But in 1933, Lincoln Kirstein, an
American arts patron with a dream of
establishing a ballet company in the
U.S., persuaded Balanchine to move to
this country. By October of that year,
Balanchine had landed here for the fi rst
time and launched his infl uence on the
character of American dance.
In New York, Balanchine’s fi rst order of
business was to establish a ballet school:
the School of American Ballet. And in
1935, a professional company was formed
— the American Ballet.
Balanchine continued to serve as
resident choreographer for the Ballets
Russes de Monte Carlo from 1944 to 1946,
but he soon formed a new dance company
— the Ballet Society — again with the
help of Lincoln Kirstein. Success leads to
space, and the Ballet Society became the
New York City Ballet in 1948. And an
institution was born.
Even 25 years after his death, Balanchine
is still a star. Through cooperation with the
Balanchine trust, companies are allowed
to perform his masterworks to exacting
specifi cations. We’re fortunate that under
the watchful tutelage of Toni Pimble, EBC
is up to the task.
ew
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EUGENE WEEKLY APRIL 17, 2008 45