Ballet

BALLET

BALLET. The "unofficial" ballet came to America with immigrant performers and dancing masters. Performances in the colonial and early federal periods were presented in the port cities on the East Coast and inland cities connected to them by navigable rivers. The first documented ballet presented in America was The Adventures of Harlequin and Scaramouch, with the Burgo'master Trick'd (4 February 1735), given in Charleston by Henry Holt, a British dancing master. The next major figure was Alexander Placide, who trained at the Paris Opéra in ballet before learning tightrope with the popular Les Grands Danseurs du Roi. He brought companies of ballet and rope dancers to Santo Domingo (1788), New York (1792), and Charleston (1794–1796). The latter seasons brought the first presentations of the Paris Opéra repertory, staged by Jean-Baptiste Francisqui.

Nineteenth-Century Touring Performers

European performers from opera houses and popular theater continued to tour and immigrate to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. Augusta Maywood and Mary Ann Lee, each raised in Philadelphia theater families, are jointly considered America's first native-born ballerinas. As adolescents, they studied with Paris Opéra–trained Paul H. Hazard and performed in Philadelphia and on the Mississippi River circuit from 1837 before going to Paris for further study. Maywood remained in Europe, becoming a prima ballerina at Milan's Teatro alla Scala. Lee returned to America, where she staged and starred in Giselle and other Romantic ballets of Jean Coralli before retiring in 1847. The tour of Fanny Elssler in 1840 imported the cults of Romantic ballet and performer celebrity to America. She was thronged from Boston south to Havana and New Orleans. Elssler's grace and pointe work inspired poems, music, laudatory odes, and engravings.

As transatlantic travel became safer, family troupes from opera-ballet and popular theater scheduled tours of North America and Central America. The gold rush brought an expansion of American audiences and theaters, especially in the San Francisco Bay area and mining communities in Nevada and Colorado. Tours for ballet on its own or as part of extravaganzas began in New York's Niblo's Garden and moved west to the theaters owned by Thomas Maguire or his rivals in San Francisco. La Scala ballerinas Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi presented ballet solos and pas de deux interpolated into huge extravaganzas, most notably The Black Crook (1867). The corps de ballets for these productions were mostly local women, trained by European émigré dancing masters.

The Impact of the Russian Ballets

Meanwhile, in Europe, ballet itself was changing. Mikhail Fokine tried to shift the emphasis of the Imperial Russian Ballet away from full-length, three-or four-act plotted ballets. He choreographed shorter works, many of them more abstract music visualizations, such as his Les Sylphides (1907) to piano works by Chopin. This change was considered "too revolutionary" for the Imperial Ballet but was adopted by impresario Serge Diaghilev for his Ballets Russes tours of western Europe. Although some full-evening ballets, such as Swan Lake, Coppelia, and The Nutcracker, remained popular, the Fokine revolution took hold in twentieth-century ballet companies and served as the model for most ballet presentations in America.

Although Diaghilev's company did not reach the United States until 1916, many rival companies of dancers associated with the troupe brought its repertoire and designs to America, using names such as the All-Star Imperial Russian Ballet. Anna Pavlova, generally considered the greatest ballerina of the early twentieth century, presented music visualizations by (or after) Fokine on annual Western Hemisphere tours from 1910 through the 1920s. Like Elssler, she inspired America's love for Romantic ballet and had a major impact on the development of ballet schools, companies, and audiences.

A large number of Ballets Russes dancers chose to stay in America, becoming teachers, choreographers, and ballet masters for theaters, civic ballets, and opera houses across the country. Many worked in prologs (short vaudevilles that alternated with feature films in motion picture palaces of the 1920s–1940s). Among them were Theodore Kosloff, who became a popular choreographer for silent films, and Mikhail Mordkin, whose school and company were the incubators for Ballet Theatre.

Sol Hurok, an impresario based in New York, had a national network of local auditoriums and concert promoters. Hurok added the post-Diaghilev Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo to his roster in 1934 and presented it until 1939 and after 1946. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and the related Original Ballet Russe toured in some manifestation until 1962. These companies brought many more fine European dancers and teachers to the United States, where they worked with opera companies, ballet schools, and universities, raising the level of technical training available in America. Hurok maintained ballet on his national roster throughout his career, becoming known in the 1950s and 1960s for his importation of the (British) Royal Ballet and the Soviet Bolshoi and Kirov companies. He was often able to place excerpts from ballet and folklore on television variety shows, such as the Ed Sullivan Show, greatly expanding the audience for ballet.

Americana Ballet

Choreographers and companies have intermittently pursued the idea that ballet in America should be distinctly American. Ballet Caravan, Lincoln Kirstein's small troupe, existed from 1936 to 1941. Although generally remembered as an interim step between the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet (NYCB), it also represents an unusual ballet experiment with Americana, living composers, and popular front imagery. The Americana ballets created for and by company members included Lew Christensen's Pocahontas (1939, music by Elliott Carter) and Filling Station (1938, Virgil Thomson); William Dollar's Yankee Clipper (1937, Paul Bowles); and Eugene Loring's masterpiece Billy the Kid (1938), with a commissioned score by Aaron Copland. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo also occasionally experimented with Americana, commissioning Ghost Town (1939, choreographed by Marc Platt to music by Richard Rodgers) and Rodeo (1942, Agnes de Mille to Aaron Copland). That work, like De Mille's Fall River Legend (1948, to Morton Gould) and Billy the Kid, remains in the active repertory of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT). The short-lived Jerome Robbins' Ballets: USA, in the mid-1950s, experimented with American movement vocabularies, jazz music, and silence. One of the few companies independent of ABT and NYCB was the Joffrey Ballet (founded 1956), which became the City Center Joffrey Ballet (NYC) in 1966 and later relocated to Chicago. Joffrey and fellow choreographer Gerald Arpino created ballet works inspired by 1960s American counterculture.

Civic, Regional, and Professional Companies

Major professional ballet companies have been established and maintained across the country. Among the best regarded are the San Francisco Ballet, associated with long-term director Lew Christensen, and Utah's Ballet West, directed by his brother Willam. There have been major companies in Chicago since the rival troupes of Ballets Russes dancers Adolf Bolm and Andreas Pavley and Serge Oukrainsky. Bolm protégée choreographer Ruth Page ran the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet for much of the latter twentieth century.

Former NYCB dancers directed companies across the country, among them the Christensens, Kent Stow-ell's Pacific Northwest Ballet, Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Edward Villella's Miami City Ballet. In the mid-1970s, two of ABT's dancers who had been experimenting with choreography left to form companies—Eliot Feld remained in New York with the Eliot Feld Ballet (later Ballet Tech), while Dennis Nahat established the San Jose Cleveland Ballet.

The schools that had been thriving since the Pavlova tours began to convert from annual recitals to established civic or regional ballet companies. Many had only two seasons per year—a Christmas presentation of The Nutcracker and a late spring "graduation" performance. But some companies became major cultural forces, performing regularly scheduled seasons with live music and professional dancers. The first Regional Ballet Festival was held in Atlanta in 1956. The National Association for Regional Ballet mounts festivals and seminars on choreography, teaching, and nonprofit management across the country. The Nutcracker is still the most popular presentation, giving American audiences a taste of ballet's history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Barbara. Ballet or Ballyhoo: The American Careers of Maria Bonfanti, Rita Sangalli, and Giuseppina Morlacchi. New York: Dance Horizons, 1984.

Barzel, Ann. "European Dance Teachers in the United States." Dance Index III, no. 4–6 (April–June, 1944).

Delarue, Allison, ed. Fanny Elssler in America. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1976. Anthology includes her memoir of the American tour as well as verses about her.

Hudson, Alice C., and Barbara Cohen-Stratyner. Heading West, Touring West: Mapmakers, Performing Artists, and the American Frontier. New York: New York Public Library, 2001.

MacDonald, Nesta. Diaghilev Observed by Critics in England and the United States, 1911–1929. New York: Dance Horizons, 1975.

Magriel, Paul, ed. Chronicles of the American Dance: From the Shakers to Martha Graham. New York: Da Capo Press, 1978. Anthology originally published in 1948.

Moore, Lillian. Echoes of American Ballet: A Collection of Seventeen Articles. New York: Dance Horizons, 1976. Anthology of historical articles from American Dancer, Dance Index, Dance Magazine, Dancing Times, and Etude.

Barbara Cohen-Stratyner

See also Alvin Ailey Dance Theater ; Dance .