George Balanchine

George Balanchine made about four hundred works, founded New York City Ballet, and built an American classical style out of speed, attack and no story at all. He was born Georgi Balanchivadze in St Petersburg, trained at the Imperial school through the revolution and the famine, and left the Soviet Union on tour in 1924 and did not return. Diaghilev hired him at twenty and gave him Apollo in 1928 and The Prodigal Son in 1929 - Apollo with Stravinsky, which Balanchine later called the turning point of his life because it taught him that he could clarify by leaving things out. When the company dissolved he worked in Europe until Lincoln Kirstein brought him to America in 1933 on the condition, which Balanchine set, that a school come before a company. The School of American Ballet opened in 1934, the company that became New York City Ballet in 1948. The works are mostly plotless and made on the music: Serenade, The Four Temperaments, Agon, Jewels, Symphony in C. He collaborated with Stravinsky across five decades, married four of his own dancers, and choreographed on Broadway and in Hollywood when the company needed money. He was still making ballets at seventy-eight. American ballet dances differently from European ballet because of him. He said that ballet is woman, which has been quoted approvingly and attacked for fifty years. He suffered from what was later identified as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The Balanchine Trust licenses his ballets and polices how they are staged. He was born in St Petersburg to a Georgian composer and left with a small touring group he had assembled himself.

• Lived: 1904 CE – 1983 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist