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Situating ballet within twentieth-century modernism, this book brings complexity to the history of George Balanchine's American neoclassicism. It intervenes in the prevailing historical narrative and rebalances Balanchine's role in dance history by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Modernism and American Ballet
- Interchapter 1. Americana Ballet I: Billy the Kid
- 2. Lincoln Kirstein's Social Modernism and the Cultural Front
- Interchapter 2. Americana Ballet II: Rodeo
- 3. Edwin Denby's Objectivist Modernism and the New York School
- Interchapter 3. Americana Ballet III: Western Symphony
- 4. The Making of an American Ballet Institution in Europe in the Cultural Cold War
- Conclusion: "We drink the health of the guy that died."
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Andrea Harris is Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Certified Movement Analyst.
Summary
Situating ballet within twentieth-century modernism, this book brings complexity to the history of George Balanchine's American neoclassicism. It intervenes in the prevailing historical narrative and rebalances Balanchine's role in dance history by revealing the complex social, cultural, and political forces that actually shaped the construction of American neoclassical ballet.
Additional text
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!
