Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine

ISBN-13: 9780199342242 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 288 str.

Andrea Harris

Opis

George Balanchine's arrival in the United States in 1933, it is widely thought, changed the course of ballet history by creating a bold and original neoclassical style that is celebrated as the first successful American manifestation of the art form. This book 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. Situating American ballet within a larger context of literary, musical, arts, and dance modernisms, Making Ballet American examines a series of critical efforts to craft new, modernist ideas about the relevance of classical dancing for the country's society and democracy. The book's unique structure interweaves chapters focused on cultural and intellectual histories of ballet production and discourse with close examinations of three Americana ballets spanning the Depression, World War II, and Cold War eras. Through this blend of cultural and choreographic analysis, Making Ballet American illustrates the evolution of modernist ballet theory and practice 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 spans several authors and continents and that pivots on the question of modern art's relationship to American society and the larger world.

Recenzje

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!

O autorze

Andrea Harris is Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Certified Movement Analyst.