The Russians had laid the groundwork. But even their presence and energetic activities would not be enough to account for the astonishing explosion of ballet in America in the decades after the Second World War. In these years, ballet became a prominent American art and an icon of high modernism. It was a cultural transformation of the first order: after decades of chorus-girl marginality and Russian exoticism, ballet suddenly seemed to represent something urgently important and quintessentially American, both in its dances and its dancers. It mattered in ways that it never had before—or since. One explanation for its precipitous rise is sheer talent: its most prominent leaders, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor, were supremely gifted choreographers, and the dancers they worked with were no less impressive. But this alone cannot explain the force of the shift. It was the changing shape of America as much as the changing shape of dance that propelled classical ballet to the forefront of modern life.
First there was the war. By 1945 Europe was exhausted and in ruins. Even the victorious powers faced the daunting prospect of rebuilding from the ground up with few resources and a population weakened by years of loss and destruction. European culture and the arts seemed spent. America, by contrast, had suffered relatively little: if anything, the war had been a boon—to the economy, to public morale, and to the country’s standing in the world. Add to this the influx of highly educated and cultivated émigrés fleeing the Nazi and Soviet regimes, a critical mass of talent and energy spanning the arts, sciences, and humanities. The war, moreover, also produced a generation of civic-minded leaders with strong connections to European culture who felt a responsibility to restore here what had been lost over there. The United States thus entered a golden age of art and ideas, fueled ironically by the collapse of European civilization.
And by the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain fell between Russia and the West, art became a powerful diplomatic tool, and government-sponsored organizations dedicated to promoting the image and art of America around the world sprang up at a dizzying rate. Thus, for example, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded in 1950 to counter Soviet cultural organizations and demonstrate the superiority of the West in literature and art. Funded in part (as it turned out) by the CIA, it sponsored, among other performances, an arts festival in Berlin that featured the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an exhibition of modern paintings, and performances by the newly founded New York City Ballet (one dancer recalls flying to Berlin in air force cargo planes). Similarly, Radio Free Europe was established with government funding in 1951, and in 1953–54 Eisenhower set up the United States Information Agency and launched the President’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs, both supported in part by government monies and mandated to promote U.S. foreign policy interests through cultural exchange.5
To win the cultural Cold War abroad, however, it also seemed imperative to emulate the Soviets and fund culture at home. Spurred by the Communist example, both the public and private sectors invested unprecedented resources in education and the arts. This was a defensive stance, but it was also part of a larger sense, deepened by the experience of state involvement in society during the war, that government could and should play a role in building a cohesive society. In 1958 Congress passed an act authorizing the establishment of a National Cultural Center (eventually named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts). The text of the act explained:
This is particularly necessary at this time when the Soviet Union and other totalitarian nations are spending vast sums for the arts in an attempt to lead the peoples of the world to believe those countries produce civilization’s best efforts in the fine arts. It is demonstrably true that wars begin in the minds of men and that it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.6
A year later ground was also broken for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. Lincoln Center was the brainchild of wealthy New Yorkers who wanted a new opera house (to replace the old Metropolitan) and of public officials interested in urban renewal; it was funded in part by federal monies under the Housing Act for Slum Clearance and built on the site of a rat-infested ghetto (whose residents were summarily displaced). President Eisenhower shoveled the first dirt, and Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in Aaron Copland’s Fanfare. At the inaugural performances in 1962, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of the State of New York and a leading figure in the center’s creation, wrote in the program dedicated to the occasion: “Lincoln Center is many things, but before all others it is a living monument to the will of free men acting together on the basis of their own initiative and idealism.”7
John F. Kennedy also made the arts a priority. His wife, Jackie, was a prominent figure at cultural events, and the glittering celebrity ethos of the White House gave new glamour and sheen to the performing arts everywhere; she sent a jet to escort Rudolf Nureyev (recently defected) and Margot Fonteyn to the White House for tea. But there was substance behind the sparkle: it was Kennedy who carried forward the plans for a National Cultural Center. After his assassination, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in Washington, D.C., and in 1965 Congress passed legislation creating the National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) and Humanities (NEH). These began modestly but grew rapidly: between 1970 and 1975 the NEA budget increased tenfold, from $8.3 million to $80 million; by 1979 it had reached an impressive $149 million.8
None of this would have been possible, of course, without the tremendous wealth generated during the war and postwar boom and the accompanying expansion of public life: the economic boom, the baby boom, the suburban boom, the media boom, the consumer boom—cars, television, washing machines, and eventually computers—the scale and speed of change in the ways people lived and how they spent their time was breathtaking. Leisure activities exploded. In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled. And as the middle classes grew more affluent, children flooded into suburban music and dance schools and new audiences flocked to theaters. Television siphoned off some, but it added many, many more: programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show featured dancers and musicians and further fueled interest in the performing arts.9
If the cultural boom took hold nationwide, its creative engine was New York City. In art, as in so much else, New York had important advantages: it attracted émigré artists and intellectuals, and was also a magnet for Americans from across the country drawn to culture and the arts. Indeed, even the briefest survey of the city’s cultural life in the years just before and after the Second World War gives a sense of its vitality: the Museum of Modern Art was established in 1929, the Whitney Museum in 1931, and the Guggenheim in 1937. After the war, the New York School of abstract expressionism, influenced by émigré artists, set the agenda for several generations of European and American painters. In music, the New York Philharmonic, which had heretofore been a modest and unstable enterprise, grew to a full-scale, world-class institution: Leonard Bernstein, himself trained and deeply influenced by the Russian émigré conductor Serge Koussevitzky, was named assistant conductor in 1943.
Theater had Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and—directing their works on Broadway and later on film—Elia Kazan (of Turkish and Greek heritage); musical theater had Rodgers and Hart (the latter from a Jewish émigré family) and then Rodgers and Hammerstein (ditto). American modern dance grew up in the creative interaction between native dance forms and German expressionism. Martha Graham (1894–1991), raised in California and influenced by Isadora Duncan’s free-form dances and by Mexican and Native American cultures, established her school and company in New York in 1926; the German dancer Hanya Holm, a protégée of the expressionist innovator Mary Wigman and an important influence on Graham and several generations of American modern dancers, arrived there in 1931. C
lassical ballet fit the pattern too. Indeed, its two most important institutions were founded in New York by Russian émigrés working with Americans: Ballet Theatre (later renamed American Ballet Theatre) in 1939 and the New York City Ballet in 1948.
The origins of Ballet Theatre lay with the American heiress Lucia Chase (1897–1986) and her Russian teacher, the émigré dancer and choreographer Mikhail Mordkin. It was an odd mix: Mordkin, formerly of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, had collaborated with Alexander Gorsky in his radical Stanislavsky-inspired ballets and was a link back to turn-of-the-century Russian modernism. Mordkin had left for Paris with Diaghilev before the First World War, and although he returned briefly to Russia, he fled again after the Revolution. Impoverished and stateless, he eventually came to the United States, where he formed and danced in several touring companies and taught ballet.
Lucia Chase was of stern New England stock (an American Ninette de Valois, some said), highly educated (Bryn Mawr), and very wealthy. She had always studied dance, but after her husband’s sudden death and in a state of intense grief and mourning, she took refuge in the discipline of ballet: “Mordkin,” she later recalled, “made me stand up again.” In 1937 she joined Mordkin’s company, financed its operations—and eventually took it over. But although Mordkin (a second-rate choreographer) was gradually eased out, the shadow of the Bolshoi remained: the newly formed Ballet Theatre would always emphasize bravura virtuosity, contemporary folk forms, and story ballets (although it would take the funding revolution of the 1960s for the company to finally afford a full-length Swan Lake).10
Chase was joined by Richard Pleasant, a young Princeton-trained architect who had come to ballet by chance and took over the management of the troupe: astonished at the growing interest for ballet across the country, it was he who first envisioned an American company that would show the public—an American public—the full range of ballet, with repertory drawn from each major period from the pre-Romantic to the modern, with a strong accent on the modern. Before the war, this might have failed: why would prominent European and Russian choreographers sign on to a start-up American troupe? But this was 1939 and Antony Tudor (who was British), Bronislava Nijinska, and Mikhail Fokine all readily accepted. Agnes de Mille came too, and George Balanchine, recently arrived from Russia via Paris and London, later contributed several works. The young Jerome Robbins joined the following year as a dancer.
Ballet Theatre’s opening season in New York in 1940 featured an impressive range of new work, but the company soon reverted to the well-worn Russian and vaudeville model. Facing financial difficulties, it fell into the hands of Sol Hurok, a canny Ukrainian impresario: he hired more Russians and booked the troupe onto the familiar theatrical touring circuits as “The Greatest in Russian Ballet.” By then, however, Tudor, Robbins, and de Mille were all producing groundbreaking and original work of their own, and they deeply resented the Russians, whom they saw as arrogant and out of touch, wedded to a stale and dying old-world Imperial art. They wanted to recalibrate dance to New York circa 1940—to the pace and people of here and now. Chase (whose checkbook still mattered) took their side, and a struggle ensued. In 1945 Chase paired up with the American designer Oliver Smith—who had worked on Broadway with de Mille in Oklahoma! in 1943 and with Robbins and Leonard Bernstein in On the Town the following year—and together they took over the directorship of Ballet Theatre. They would remain at the helm until 1980.
Like Ballet Theatre, the origins of the New York City Ballet lay in an unlikely Russian-American encounter. Its founders, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996), had sharply different backgrounds. Balanchine, as we have seen, came from Imperial and Orthodox St. Petersburg and the Russian Revolution. Kirstein was a Boston Brahmin Jew. Like Chase, he brought wealth, connections, and tremendous perseverance, and like her, he had come to ballet through Diaghilev and the Russians: as a child he had seen Pavlova dance in Boston, and in the early 1920s he attended performances of the Ballets Russes in Europe. But the similarities end there. Kirstein was a far more complicated figure, and his reasons for tying his fate to ballet, and to Balanchine, are a key to why ballet finally “took” in America—and assumed the shape it did at the New York City Ballet. Why would a man like Kirstein—Harvard-educated, wealthy, with a brilliant literary mind and carte blanche to any profession he chose—commit himself so passionately to (of all things) classical ballet?
Kirstein had no theatrical background. His grandfather, who was German and Jewish, was a lens grinder from Jena who emigrated in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and his father had risen to a position of prominence (and wealth) as a partner at Filene’s Department Store in Boston. The family was cultivated and actively involved in the cultural and charitable life of the city. Kirstein’s father was president and patron of the Boston Public Library and his parents read widely and attended opera, ballet, and concerts. They were also Anglophiles, and as a young man Kirstein spent time in London, where he mixed with the Bloomsbury set (it was Maynard Keynes who first introduced him to the work of Gauguin and Cézanne) and went to the ballet. Later, as a student at Harvard, Kirstein’s involvement in the arts deepened: he founded and edited a prominent literary journal, The Hound and Horn, and was a key player in the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, forerunner to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Yet for all of his impressive early accomplishments, Kirstein was also restless and troubled. A large and imposing figure (six foot three), he was physically awkward, gawky even, and appeared painfully self-conscious: pictures show him too artfully posed, and later in life he would develop a glowering hunchbacked appearance, inward and intense. There were reasons for his discomfort. By background and education Kirstein belonged to the social elite, and he moved in that world as a consummate insider; but he was also too Jewish and too darkly introspective to really fit with Harvard’s lads or New York’s WASPish upper classes—though not Jewish enough to fall back into his father’s old-world and civic-minded milieu. It did not help that he was homosexual (although he also loved women and married one) or that he was prone to severe depression and mental illness.
All of this, combined with a driving but unfocused ambition, made it difficult for Kirstein to settle. He traveled, sought out the Armenian-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whose sacred dances and sex-tinged “awakening” rituals drew in Kirstein (and other literary figures) and fed his longing to break out of the stultifying molds of his own past. In the early 1930s, still unsure of what to do or where to go, he moved to New York and flung himself into the city’s literary and artistic high bohemia: all-night parties, slumming in Harlem, excursions to low-life homosexual haunts, and impassioned but fleeting love affairs. He wanted to be an artist—he had studied painting and even briefly considered a career as a dancer—but he had the hard, analytic mind of a critic instead and found himself depressingly ill-suited for the occupations he most admired.
But if Kirstein’s life seemed (by his own account) unstable and uncertain, his intellectual taste was anything but. His literary sensibilities inclined to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, among others. At Harvard he “lived” The Waste Land, and he had a lifelong admiration for Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). He corresponded with Pound, who briefly sent barbed missives to The Hound and Horn, and in New York Auden was a close friend. Drawing on the work of these writers, among many others, and energetically involved in the art, music, and theater worlds of Paris, London, and New York, Kirstein made himself a life-long advocate of a new classicism in art, “free” (as Pound once put it in another context) “of emotional slither.”11
In dance, he despised what he took to be the self-indulgent excesses of Romanticism—exemplified by the nightly “ritual suicides” of diva ballerinas in Giselle—and was equally unforgiving of contemporary American modern dance, which seemed to him a flagrant display of ego masquerading as art; Martha Graham’s dances, he once said, were “a cross between shitting and be
lching.” He would similarly scoff at abstract expressionism in painting, seeing in it a willful rejection of the skill and tradition that he took to be the premise of artistic endeavor. Representation and the human figure, he insisted, were the ground zero of Western art.12
Classical ballet seemed to stand for everything that Kirstein cared about. Here, finally, was an art that idealized the human body, but not through sentiment or self-expression. Instead, dancers subjected themselves to a ruthless, scientific training that transformed the body from “me and my feelings” to something more elevated and universal. It was formal and detached, based on military-style discipline and (as he liked to put it) monastic self-denial—but it was also, paradoxically, a boldly sensual and sexual art. This had nothing to do with sylphs or princes: Kirstein took his cue instead from the severe and erotic modernism pioneered by Vaslav Nijinsky and the “revivified, purer, cleaner classicism” of Balanchine. He had never seen Nijinsky perform, but he nonetheless developed a lifelong interest in (and love for) the dancer, whose physical vitality and stern, brooding intellect seemed perhaps to mirror his own. As for Balanchine, Kirstein had seen Apollon Musagète in London in 1928, and two years later he wrote admiringly (echoing Diaghilev) of the ballet’s astonishing “spareness” and “lack of decoration.” No “emotional slither” here.13
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