George Balanchine Essay -- Choreographer Art Ballet Essays

George BalanchineIf composers are the see to its of time, then the choreographer George Balanchine is the master of visual realization of that time in human terms. A master in both the kinesthetic and musical frames of creativity, he did non devote his energies to music visualization by assigning a certain number of dancers to take on strings, others the brass, and still others woodwinds or percussion but by creating a visual analogy in space that restates the musical structure with the trained dancers body. He claimed that Ballet... should not be an illustrator of even...the most substantive of literary sources. It will speak for itself. The ballet is flowers, beauty, poetry...I am, if you please, an advocate of pure art. Balanchines most intense desire was to make audiences see music and hear dancing.Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze was born the second of three children to Meliton Balanchivadze and his wife Marie on January 22,1904 in the village of Banodzha in western Georgi a. His older sister was named Tamara and his younger brother, Andrei. Georgi was a very reserved child and never showed his emotions. When he was punished he would hide, afraid someone would see him crying. When translated, balanchivadze means jesters son, which always amused Balanchine because his father was a singer and composer, and his mother was a pianist who encouraged the musical development of her children. When Meliton was home from his many tours and study trips he would teach the children to sing, and all three of them took sonant lessons. At parties Andrei and Tamara would often dance for the guests but Georgi refused because he hated anything to do with dance and performance.When she reached the official age for admitt... ... companies perform at least one Balanchine work. Upon his death, it was indite in the New York Review of Books that George Balanchine liked to say, quoting Mayakovsky, I am not a man, but a cloud in trousers. And now that luminous cloud has floa ted off, leave us with a loss far deeper than the grave.Works CitedA Ballet Society Book. Portraits of Mr. B Photographs of George Balanchine. New York The Viking Press, 1984.Buckle, Richard. George Balanchine Ballet Master. New York Random House, 1988.Flatow, Sheryl. The Balanchine Trust guardian of the Legacy. Dance Magazine. December 1990, p 58-61.McDonagh, Don. George Balanchine. Boston Twayne Publishers, 1983.Reynolds, Nancy. Balanchine in the USSR Cultural Revelation. Dance Magazine. January 1994, p 88-90.Taper, Bernard. Balanchine A Biography. New York Times Books, 1984.