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Making Ballet American

Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine. Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

By (author) Andrea Harris
Format: Paperback / softback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York, United States
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Published: 16th Nov 2017
Dimensions: w 157mm h 235mm d 17mm
Weight: 414g
ISBN-10: 0199342245
ISBN-13: 9780199342242
Barcode No: 9780199342242
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Synopsis
George Balanchine's arrival in the United States in 1933, it is widely thought, changed the course of ballet history by creating a bold neoclassical style that is celebrated as the first American manifestation of the art form. In Making Ballet American, author Andrea Harris challenges this narrative by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet. Situating American ballet within a larger context of modernisms, the book examines critical efforts to craft new, modernist ideas about the relevance of classical dancing for American society and democracy. Through cultural and choreographic analysis, it illustrates the evolution of modernist ballet during a turbulent historical period. Ultimately, the book argues that the Americanization of Balanchine's neoclassicism was not the inevitable outcome of his immigration or his creative genius, but rather a far more complicated story that pivots on the question of modern arts relationship to America and the larger world.

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Essential reading for anyone studying ballet in the twentieth century, Americanism in dance, and the institutional structures that have shaped the concert dance world to this day. * Theatre Survey * With this book, her first, Harris (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) makes an important contribution to analyses of 20th-century American ballet. She positions American ballet, especially the neoclassical works of George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, within broad international contexts-artistic, cultural, political, and social developments during the period from the Depression through the Cold War. Her method is to alternate chapters and interchapters. The
chapters complicate the development of American ballet modernism by using detailed critical study of the writings of Balanchine's sponsor Lincoln Kirstein and dance critic Edwin Denby. The interchapters provide close readings of the American ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Western
Symphony (1954). These help anchor the more theoretical writing in specific danced examples. * Choice * Andrea Harris's Making Ballet American is a remarkable tale of two men - Kirstein, the brilliant ballet entrepreneur, and Denby, the poet of dance critics - who, together and separely, championed Balanchine's neoclassicism as the cynosure of American ballet. But the book's historical synthesis is even more gripping, focusing on how modernist artists and thinkers from all walks of American culture confronted the deep, underlying fears of the twentieth
century: mass media's potential to create unthinking mobs in the guise of fascism, totalitarianism, and even unbridled capitalism. At last, a critical intellectual history of twentieth-century ballet in America - one that is particularly resonant in our time, and full of irony, as individuals initially driven by
countercultural and nonconformist values erect elite institutions guaranteed to quash alternative voices! * Joellen Meglin, Dance Chronicle *