Introduction to 1952 Souvenir Booklet

By Lincoln Kirstein

In a great ballet company, upon what does greatness depend? Upon repertory, audience, personnel and tradition. Our New York City Ballet is called the greatest company in the West. It is not by chance that this recognition has arrived quite quickly. Twenty years of preparations lie behind this immediate position and prestige; almost two centuries of uninterrupted tradition in training and performance maintain its special style and staging.

George Balanchine, still a young man, had been final choreographer for Serge Diaghilev, who commencing with Fokine and Nijinsky of the great imperial companies, soon invested his exiled dancers with international advance-guard music and painting, lavishing them on the wide world as a seminal force. Russian-schooled in state academies of music and dance, Balanchine came of age creatively in Paris, where, more than two centuries before, classic ballet as we know it was born in the court-opera of Louis XIV. Transplanting his already recognized genius in New York City in 1933, he founded, with Lincoln Kirstein, the School of the American Ballet.

This school, now the largest and most secure in the world ( outside European state-subventioned institutions ) is staffed by masters of theatrical dancing, each one famous on the world’s stage, each a preceptor of the virtuoso methods of Franco-Russian taste and style. Here have been instructed the distinguished soloists and incomparable corps de ballet, which, within the last five years, have established our new criterion, as has been attested by the honors accorded them in recent tours of England and the continent. The style of the New York dancers, as analyzed by Balanchine, capitalizes on the lithe, long-lined athleticism and innate rhythmic gift, as well as a certain gracious angular abruptness inbred here. In forty years he has framed and adorned this new-found native intelligence.

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