Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost and Ballet Reborn

In 1933, George Balanchine arrived in the United States, brought by even younger sponsors who had dreamed of inventing an American ballet. He came with extraordinary skills: he had trained as a child in Russia’s imperial dance academy, he had absorbed the utopian ideals of the Russian revolution, and he had spent nine years in a culturally volatile interwar Europe. But on a new continent, his career was blocked by local biases, global politics, and even his own character. His sponsors had their own ideas of what this new art should look like. A bigger-scale, European-based ballet company was crowding into the U.S. arts scene. A combination of Balanchine’s loneliness and ill-health, both traceable to the revolutionary turmoil of his native city, St. Petersburg, were pushing him towards romantic obsessions with young female dancers - obsessions that seem today to border on the unethical.

Balanchine Finds His America provides a close-up of this crucial time in the life of a young immigrant choreographer who would become one of the 20th century’s greatest artists. It opens on Balanchine’s first day in the United States and closes 13 years later, with the culture’s recognition of his importance. Along the way, it sketches in the extreme politics of his time from the Great Depression to WWII, evokes the places that inspired him from New York City to Hollywood, and charts the sexuality of longing that fueled his creative life, but also threatened his and his muses’ personal stability. It draws connections between Balanchine’s loves and the earliest ballets he made on American soil, especially his mysterious exploration of American romance, Serenade (1933), and his even more mysterious 1946 masterwork, The Four Temperaments, that pointed the way to America’s victorious postwar art of abstraction.

Most of all, this book highlights the young Balanchine’s tragic yet triumphant inner journey towards American-ness, and the impact of this journey on the ballet organizations he helped form and the legacy he left the world.

Elizabeth Kendall is a dance and culture historian, and a memoirist, based in New York City. She is the author of five books: Where She Danced; The Runaway Bride; American Daughter; Autobiography of a Wardrobe; Balanchine and the Lost Muse, and the forthcoming Two-Part Inventions: Scenes from a Friendship. She has published numerous articles in newspapers and journals and spoken at many academic conferences and public venues. Since 2010 she has been an associate professor at Lang College of New School and New School’s New School for Social Research.