GEORGE BALANCHINE (1904-1983)
George Balanchine, born Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg, Russia, is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. At the age of nine, he was accepted into the ballet section of St. Petersburg's rigorous Imperial Theater School, and, with other young students, was soon appearing on the stage of the famed Maryinsky Theater in such spectacles as The Sleeping Beauty (his favorite). He graduated with honors in 1921 and joined the corps de ballet of the Maryinsky, by then renamed the State Theater of Opera and Ballet.

The son of a composer, Balanchine gained a knowledge of music early in life that far exceeded that of most of his fellow choreographers. He began piano lessons at five, and at some point between 1919 and 1921, while continuing to dance, he enrolled in the Petrograd Conservatory of Music. There he studied piano and music theory, including composition, harmony, and counterpoint, for three years, and he began to compose music. (In the upheaval of the Russian Revolution, when money was worthless, he sometimes played the piano in cabarets and silent movie houses in exchange for bread.) Such extensive musical training made it possible for Balanchine as a choreographer to communicate with a composer of the stature of Stravinsky; it also gave him the ability to make piano reductions of orchestral scores, an invaluable aid in translating music into dance.

Balanchine began to choreograph while still in his teens, creating his first work in 1920 or earlier. It was a pas de deux called La Nuit, for himself and a female student, to the music of Anton Rubinstein. Another of his early duets, Enigma, danced in bare feet, was performed once at a benefit on the stage of the State Theater, as well as for some years thereafter, in both Petrograd/Leningrad and in the West. In 1923, he and some of his colleagues formed a small troupe, the Young Ballet, for which he composed several works in an experimental vein, but the authorities disapproved, and the performers were threatened with dismissal if they continued to participate. Then fatefully, in the summer of 1924, Balanchine and three other dancers were permitted to leave the newly formed Soviet Union for a tour of Western Europe. They did not return. With Balanchine were Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, and Nicholas Efimov, all of whom later became well known in the West. Seen performing in London, the dancers were invited by the impresario Serge Diaghilev to audition for his renowned Ballets Russes and were taken into the company.

Diaghilev had his eye on Balanchine as a choreographer as well and, with the departure of Bronislava Nijinska, hired him as ballet master (principal choreographer). Balanchine's first substantive effort was Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (1925), the first of four treatments he would make of this wondrous score over the years. Then came a reworking of Stravinsky's Le Chant du Rossignol, in which 14-year-old Alicia Markova made her stage debut. From that time until 1929, when the Ballets Russes collapsed with Diaghilev's death, Balanchine created nine more ballets (in addition to numerous slighter pieces), including the immortal Apollon Musagète (1928) and Prodigal Son (1929). During this period, Balanchine suffered a serious knee injury. This limited his dancing and may have bolstered his commitment to full-time choreography.

The next years were uncertain ones. Balanchine was making a movie with former Diaghilev ballerina Lydia Lopokova (the wife of British economist John Maynard Keynes) when he heard of Diaghilev's death. He soon began staging dances for Britain's popular Cochran Revues; acted as guest ballet master for the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen; and was engaged by its founder René Blum as ballet master for a new Ballets Russes, the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, for which he choreographed three ballets around the talents of the young Tamara Toumanova-Cotillon, La Concurrence, and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

Leaving the Ballets Russes (perhaps due to the aggressive presence of Colonel W. de Basil, who soon took the company away from René Blum), Balanchine formed Les Ballets 1933, with Boris Kochno, Diaghilev's last private secretary, as artistic advisor and the backing of British socialite Edward James. For the company's first-and only-season, he created six new ballets, in collaboration with such leading artistic figures as Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (The Seven Deadly Sins), artist Pavel Tchelitchew (Errante), and composers Darius Milhaud (Les Songes) and Henri Sauget (Fastes). But the troupe disbanded in a matter of months. It was during its London engagement, however, that a meeting occurred that would change the history of 20th-century dance.

The young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), raised in Boston and a graduate of Harvard University, harbored a dream: To establish a ballet company in America, filled with American dancers and not dependent on repertory from Europe. Through Romola Nijinsky, whom Kirstein had assisted in writing a biography of her husband, he met Balanchine after a Les Ballets 1933 performance and outlined his vision. Balanchine was essential to it. Deciding quicky in favor of a new start, Balanchine agreed to come to the United States and arrived in New York in October 1933. "But first, a school," he is famously reported to have said.

Kirstein was prepared to support the idea, and the first product of their collaboration was indeed a school, the School of American Ballet, founded in 1934 with the assistance of Edward M.M. Warburg, a Harvard colleague. (The first classes were held January 2.) The School remains in operation to this day, training dancers for the New York City Ballet and companies worldwide. The first ballet Balanchine choreographed in America--Serenade, to Tchaikovsky--was created for students of the School and had its world premiere outdoors at Warburg's summer home near White Plains, New York, in 1934. Within a year, Balanchine and Kirstein had created a professional company, the American Ballet, which made its debut at the Adelphi Theater, New York City, in March 1935. After a handful of summer performances, a projected tour collapsed, but the troupe remained together as the resident ballet company at the Metropolitan Opera. However, Balanchine had no interest in choreographing opera dances, and the Met had little interest in furthering the cause of ballet; in the American Ballet's three years at the Met, Balanchine was allowed just two all-dance programs. In 1936, he mounted a dance-drama version of Gluck's Orfeo and Eurydice, controversial in that the singers were relegated to the pit while the dancers claimed the stage. The second program, in 1937, was, prophetically, devoted to Stravinsky: a revival of Apollo plus two new works, Le Baiser de la Fée and Card Game. It was the first of three festivals Balanchine devoted to Stravinsky over the years.

The fifty-year collaboration of these two creative giants is unique in the 20th century. Stravinsky's description of their work together on Balustrade in 1940 is implicitly a description of their shared vision. He wrote, "Balanchine composed the choreography as he listened to my recording, and I could actually observe him conceiving gestures, movement, combinations, and composition. The result was a series of dialogues perfectly complementary to and coordinated with the dialogues of the music." (In 1972, Balanchine choreographed a new ballet to the same score, Stravinsky Violin Concerto.)

The American Ballet's association with the Met came to an end in 1938 and Balanchine took several of his dancers to Hollywood. In 1941, he and Kirstein assembled another classical company, American Ballet Caravan, for a five-month good-will tour of South America. In the repertory were two major new Balanchine works, Concerto Barocco and Ballet Imperial (later renamed Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2). But after the tour this company, too, disbanded, and the dancers were forced to find work elsewhere. Between 1944 and 1946 Balanchine was engaged to revitalize Sergei Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo after the departure of Massine. There he choreographed Danses Concertantes (1944), Raymonda, and Night Shadow (later called La Sonnambula, both in 1946), while reviving Concerto Barocco, Le Baiser de la Fée, Serenade, Ballet Imperial, and Card Party (renamed Jeu de Cartes). Many of Balanchine's most important early works were introduced to America at large by the Ballet Russe, which toured the length and breadth of the country for nine months of the year.

George Balanchine teaching.
Courtesy NYCB Archives Ballet Society Collection

In 1946 Balanchine and Kirstein formed Ballet Society, presenting to small New York subscription-only audiences such new Balanchine works as The Four Temperaments (1946) and Orpheus (1948). On the strength Orpheus, praised as one of New York's premiere cultural events of the year, Morton Baum, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the New York City Center of Music and Drama, invited the company to join City Center (of which the New York City Drama Company and the New York City Opera were already a part). With the performance of October 11, 1948, consisting of Concerto Barocco, Orpheus, and Symphony in C (created for the Paris Opera Ballet as Le Palais de Cristal the previous year), the New York City Ballet was born. Balanchine's talents had at last found a permanent home.

From that time until his death in 1983, Balanchine served as ballet master for the New York City Ballet, choreographing the majority of the productions the Company has introduced from its inception to the present day. An authoritative catalogue of Balanchine's output lists 425 works, beginning with La Nuit and ending with Variations for Orchestra (1982), a solo for Suzanne Farrell. In between, he created a body of work as extensive as it was diverse. Among his notable ballets were Firebird and Bourrée Fantasque (1949; Firebird restaged with Jerome Robbins in 1970); La Valse (1951); Scotch Symphony (1952); The Nutcracker (his first full-length work for the company), Western Symphony, and Ivesiana (1954); Allegro Brillante (1956); Agon (1957); Stars and Stripes and The Seven Deadly Sins (1958); Episodes (1959, choreographed with Martha Graham); Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux and Liebeslieder Walzer (1960); A Midsummer Night's Dream (1962); Bugaku and Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1963); Don Quixote (in three acts) and Harlequinade (in two acts, both 1965); Jewels (called the first full-length plotless ballet,1967); and Who Cares? (1970). In June, 1972, Balanchine staged an intensive week-long celebration of Stravinsky. Of the twenty-one new works presented during the festival, eight were by Balanchine, including four major ones, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Duo Concertant, Symphony in Three Movements, and Divertimento from "Le Baiser de la Fée." Response to the Stravinsky Festival by critics and the public was overwhelming.

In 1975, Balanchine staged a second New York City Ballet Festival, this time a three-week homage to Ravel. This celebration produced sixteen new works by various choreographers, including Balanchine's Tzigane, Le Tombeau de Couperin, and Sonatine.
Over the next seven years, Balanchine added more than a dozen works to the New York City Ballet's repertory. First came Union Jack (1976), observing the U.S. Bicentennial by honoring Great Britain, followed by the lavish Vienna Waltzes (1977). Ballo della Regina and Kammermusik No. 2 were choreographed in 1978, Ballade, Robert Schumann's "Davidsbündlertänze," and Walpurgisnacht Ballet in 1980. Balanchine's last important work, a new version of Mozartiana (a ballet originally choreographed for Les Ballets 1933), was created for the Tchaikovsky Festival of 1981. In 1982 he directed the Stravinsky Centennial Celebration, but by then he was terminally ill.

Although it is for ballet choreography that he is most noted, Balanchine also worked in musical theater and movies. On Broadway, he created dances for Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 and On Your Toes, including the groundbreaking "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" ballet (1936); Babes in Arms (1937); I Married an Angel and The Boys from Syracuse (1938); Louisiana Purchase and Cabin in the Sky, co-choreographed with Katherine Dunham (1940); The Merry Widow (1943); and Where's Charley? (1948), among others. His movie credits include The Goldwyn Follies, with its famous "water nymph" ballet (1938); I Was an Adventuress (1940); and Star Spangled Rhythm (1942). All starred Vera Zorina.

Embracing television, Balanchine staged many of his ballets (or excerpts) and created new work especially for the medium: in 1962, he collaborated with Stravinsky on Noah and the Flood and in 1981 redesigned his 1975 staging of L'Enfant et les Sortilèges to include a wide range of special effects, including animation. Through televison, millions of people have been able to see New York City Ballet. "Choreography by Balanchine," a five-part "Dance in America" presentation on the PBS series "Great Performances," began in December 1977. Programs featured The Four Temperaments, Prodigal Son, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Chaconne, and segments of Jewels, among several others. Most are now available on video. Balanchine traveled to Nashville with the Company for the tapings in 1977 and 1978 and personally supervised every shot, in some cases revising steps or angles for greater effectiveness on screen. The series was widely applauded by critics and audiences all over the country and was nominated for an Emmy award. In January 1978, New York City Ballet participated in the acclaimed PBS series "Live from Lincoln Center," when Coppelia, choreographed by Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova in 1974, was telecast live from the stage of the New York State Theater. Eight years later, the Company appeared on another "Live from Lincoln Center" program, performing Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Apollo, Orpheus, Mozartiana, and Who Cares? are among other Balanchine ballets seen on national television.

In 1970, U.S.News and World Report attempted to summarize Balanchine's achievements: "The greatest choreographer of our time, George Balanchine is responsible for the successful fusion of modern concepts with older ideas of classical ballet. Balanchine received his training in Russia before coming to America in 1933. Here, the free-flowing U.S. dance forms stimulated him to develop new techniques in dance design and presentation, which have altered the thinking of the world of dance.

Often working with modern music and the simplest of themes, he has created ballets that are celebrated for their imagination and originality. His company, New York City Ballet, is the leading dance group of the United States and one of the great companies of the world. An essential part of the success of Balanchine's group has been the training of his dancers, which he has supervised since the founding of his School of American Ballet in 1934. Balanchine chose to shape talent locally, and he has said that the basic structure of the American dancer was responsible for inspiring some of the striking lines of his compositions. Balanchine is not only gifted in creating entirely new productions, . . . his choreography for classical works has been equally fresh and inventive. He has made American dance the most advanced and richest in choreographic development in the world today."

Balanchine himself wrote, "We must first realize that dancing is an absolutely independent art, not merely a secondary accompanying one. I believe that it is one of the great arts. . . . The important thing in ballet is the movement itself. A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle . . . is the essential element. The choreographer and the dancer must remember that they reach the audience through the eye. It's the illusion created which convinces the audience, much as it is with the work of a magician." Balanchine always preferred to call himself a craftsman rather than a creator, comparing himself to a cook or cabinetmaker (both hobbies of his), and he had a reputation throughout the dance world for the calm and collected way in which he worked with his dancers and colleagues.

As his reputation grew, he was the recipient of much official recognition. In the spring of 1975, the Entertainment Hall of Fame in Hollywood inducted Balanchine as a member, in a nationally televised special by Gene Kelly. The first choreographer so honored, he joined the ranks of such show business luminaries as Fred Astaire, Walt Disney, and Bob Hope. The same year, he received the French Légion d'Honneur. In 1978, he was one of five recipients (with Marian Anderson, Fred Astaire, Richard Rodgers, and Artur Rubinstein) of the first Kennedy Center Honors, presented by President Jimmy Carter. He was also presented with a Knighthood of the Order of Dannebrog, First Class, by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. In 1980, Balanchine was honored by the National Society of Arts and Letters with their Gold Medal award, the Austrian government with its Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Letters, First Class, and by the New York Chapter of the American Heart Association with their "Heart of New York" award. These joined such earlier commendations as the French Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters decoration and the National Institute of Arts and Letters award for Distinguished Service to the Arts. The last major award Balanchine received--in absentia--was the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, the highest honor that can be conferred on a civilian in the United States. At the time, President Ronald Reagan praised Balanchine's genius, saying that he has "inspired millions with his stage choreography . . . and amazed a diverse population through his talents." Soon after, on April 30, 1983, George Balanchine died in New York at the age of 79.

Clement Crisp, one of the many writers who eulogized Balanchine, assessed his contribution: "It is hard to think of the ballet world without the colossal presence of George Balanchine. . . . Now he is gone and, as Lincoln Kirstein said in his brief and infinitely apt curtain speech, 'Mr. B. is with Mozart and Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.' But we have not lost Balanchine-not the essential Balanchine, who lives in the great catalogue of masterpieces that have so shaped and refined our understanding of ballet and given it-and us-thrilling life. And we are not without the other essential fact of his work: his School and the training system that has tuned American bodies as the ideal classical medium for his ideal classic vision. We can never be without Balanchine. He is so central to the danse d'école in our century, so surely its guiding force, that grief becomes mere self-indulgence. Gratitude and joy must be our feeling for what he gave us, and determination that his work and ideals be honored and preserved and used to illuminate the future of ballet."

Reprinted, with emendations, courtesy of the New York City Ballet and The George Balanchine Trust

VAL CANIPAROLI
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NICOLO FONTE
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WILLIAM FORSYTHE
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JAMES KUDELKA
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PETER MARTINS
Danish-born Peter Martins has spent more than 30 years with New York City Ballet as a dancer, choreographer, and Ballet Master.  Mr. Martins’ association with New York City Ballet began in 1967, when he was invited to dance the title role in George Balanchine’s Apollo during the Company’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival.  He then performed as a guest artist with New York City Ballet for three years before joining the Company as a principal dancer in 1970.  Prior to retiring from dancing in 1983, Mr. Martins danced a tremendous variety of roles with the Company, ranging in style from Balanchine and Alexandra Danilova’s version of the 19th-century classic Coppélia to such works as Balanchine’s Serenade, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and Symphony in C, to Jerome Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and Other Dances.  As a dancer, Mr. Martins was lauded for his outstanding partnering skills and noble stage presence.

In 1981, Mr. Martins was named Ballet Master for New York City Ballet, a title he shared with Balanchine, Robbins, and John Taras.  From 1983 to 1989, Mr. Martins and Robbins served as Co-Ballet Masters in Chief of New York City Ballet, sharing the responsibility of overseeing the Company’s operations.  In 1990, following Robbins’ decision to leave New York City Ballet to pursue other projects, Mr. Martins assumed sole directorship of the Company, which involves day-to-day management of one of the world’s largest ballet companies, with more than 90 dancers, and an active repertory of more than 150 ballets.  In addition, Mr. Martins is Chairman of the Faculty of the School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet.

Mr. Martins began his career as a choreographer in 1977 with Calcium Light Night, set to several pieces of music by Charles Ives.  He has since created more than 70 ballets – primarily for New York City Ballet – ranging from pas de deux to large-scale pieces, set to music by composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, George Gershwin and John Adams.

During his tenure as Ballet Master in Chief, Mr. Martins has directed several important festivals and anniversary celebrations.  In 1988, to celebrate the Company’s 40th anniversary, he conceived of the American Music Festival, a three-week celebration of American music, art, and dance.  Works by choreographers such as Lar Lubovitch, Laura Dean, Eliot Feld, William Forsythe, and Paul Taylor shared the stage with ballets by Balanchine and Robbins.  Mr. Martins contributed nine ballets, including Barber Violin Concerto, The Chairman Dances, A Fool For You, and The Waltz Project.  In 1993, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Balanchine’s death, Mr. Martins planned the Company’s historic Balanchine Celebration, which featured a season-long retrospective of Balanchine’s work performed in chronological order, culminating in Dinner with Balanchine, the Celebration’s closing-night performance which aired on PBS’s Dance in America series.  In 1998, Mr. Martins planned New York City Ballet’s 50th anniversary season, a year-long celebration featuring an unprecedented performance schedule of more than 100 ballets during the Company’s winter and spring seasons at the New York State Theater.  For the Company’s 2003-2004 season, to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine, Mr. Martins conceived Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration as a year-long exhibition-style approach to Balanchine’s life and work.  In addition to the season’s 54 ballets choreographed by Balanchine, the celebration saw world premiere ballets from Boris Eifman, Susan Stroman, Christopher Wheeldon, and Mr. Martins’ Chichester Psalms and Eros Piano.

In 1992, in keeping with the Balanchine tradition of both choreographing and commissioning new works, Mr. Martins conceived of the Diamond Project as a biennial festival to give choreographers the opportunity to create new works within the vocabulary of classical ballet. The Diamond Project, and its precursor, the American Music Festival, have contributed more than 60 works to the NYCB repertory, created by 32 different choreographers.  To further encourage ballet choreographers, in September 2000, Mr. Martins and Irene Diamond, the principal benefactor of the Diamond Project, launched the New York Choreographic Institute. Each year the Institute provides selected choreographers with the opportunity to work with dancers from New York City Ballet in the Company’s rehearsal studios at Lincoln Center.  These sessions give choreographers a rare chance to explore and experiment with choreographic ideas, without the pressures of preparing for a performance.

Other ballets created by Mr. Martins include Adams Violin Concerto (to a co-commissioned score by John Adams), Ash, Bach Concerto V, Beethoven Romance, Burleske, Concerti Armonici, Eight Easy Pieces, Eight More, Fearful Symmetries, Guide to Strange Places, Hallelujah Junction, Harmonielehre, Jazz (Six Syncopated Movements) and Them Twos, (both in collaboration with Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center), Jeu de Cartes, Reliquary, River of Light, The Sleeping Beauty, Slonimsky’s Earbox, Stabat Mater, the full-length Swan Lake (after Petipa, Ivanov, and Balanchine), Symphonic Dances, Thou Swell, Todo Buenos Aires, Walton Cello Concerto, and Zakouski.
 
A number of Mr. Martins’ works have been taped for broadcast by the PBS series Dance in America, airing on such programs as “A Choreographer’s Notebook:  Stravinsky Piano Ballets by Peter Martins” and “Ballerinas: Dances by Peter Martins.”  One of Mr. Martins’ projects away from New York City Ballet was the choreography of the “Dance” portion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Song and Dance, which opened on Broadway in 1985.  Mr. Martins’ ballet A Fool For You, featuring music written and performed by Ray Charles, was telecast on Live from Lincoln Center in 1989.  Mr. Martins’ full-length Swan Lake featuring New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater was telecast on Live from Lincoln Center in 1999.

Mr. Martins’ autobiography, Far From Denmark, was published by Little, Brown in 1982.  Mr. Martins was made a Knight of The First Order of Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark in September of 1983.

Courtesy of New York City Ballet

No choreographer has so epitomized the American scene, or been so profligate in his expenditure of his creative energy. He contributed a great body of superb work to our dance culture, represented all over the world, and in the continuous performances of musicals during the last thirty-five years.

His career as a gifted ballet dancer developed with Ballet Theatre where he danced with special distinction the role of Petrouchka, and character roles in the works of Fokine, Tudor, Massine, Lichine and de Mille, and of course his first choreographic sensation: Fancy Free (1944). This ballet, followed by Interplay (1945) and Facsimile (1946), was performed by Ballet Theatre, after which he embarked on a prolific and enormously successful career as a choreographer and later as a director of Broadway musicals and plays. His first musical, "On the Town," (1945), was followed by "Billion Dollar Baby" (1946), "High Button Shoes (1947), "Look, Ma, I'm Dancing" (which he co-directed with George Abbott in 1948, "Miss Liberty" (1949), "Call Me Madame" (1950), and the ballet "Small House of Uncle Thomas" in "The King and I" (1951). His work continued with "Two's Company" (1952), "Pajama Game" (again co-directed with Mr. Abbott in 1954), and "Peter Pan" (1954), which he directed and choreographed. In the same year, he also directed the opera "The Tender Land" by Aaron Copland. Two years after that, he directed and choreographed "Bells are Ringing" (1956), followed by the historic, operatic and balletic "West Side Story" (1957). He then performed the same tasks for "Gypsy" (1959) and "Fiddler on the Roof" (1964). He was simultaneously creating ballets for the New York City Ballet, which he joined in 1949 as Associate Artistic Director with George Balanchine. Among his outstanding works were The Guests (1949), Age of Anxiety (1951), The Cage (1951), The Pied Piper (1951), Afternoon of a Faun (1953), Fanfare (1953) and The Concert(1956), the latter the most hilarious of all ballets. For his own company, Ballets U.S.A. (1958 - 1962), he created N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz (1958), Moves (1959) and Events (1961). The company performed to acclaim in the United States and Europe. He directed the Ford 50th Anniversary Show with Mary Martin and Ethel Merman for television in 1953, followed by a 1955 telecast of "Peter Pan" for which he received an Emmy Award. He co-directed and choreographed the movie "West Side Story" (1960), for which he received two Academy Awards. Off-Broadway, he directed the play by Arthur Kopit, "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad" (1962). The following year, he directed and co-produced Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children." For American Ballet Theatre's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary (1965), he staged Stravinsky's dance cantata, Les Noces, a work of shattering and immense impact.

After the triumph of "Fiddler on the Roof," Mr. Robbins dedicated his energies to creating ballets for New York City Ballet. In 1988 he took a leave of absence to stage "Jerome Robbins' Broadway," which opened in 1989 to resounding critical and popular acclaim, and in 1990 he resigned from the position of Ballet Master in Chief -- which he shared with Peter Martins -- to pursue other projects. A partial list of his fifty-four creations includes: Dances at a Gathering (1969); The Goldberg Variations (1971); Watermill (1972); Requiem Canticles (1972); The Dybbuk Variations (1974); In G Major (1975); Mother Goose (1975); The Four Seasons (1979); Opus 19: The Dreamer (1979); Piano Pieces (1981); Gershwin Concerto (1982); Glass Pieces (1983); I'm Old Fashioned (1983); Antique Epigraphs (1984); Brahms/Handel (with Twyla Tharp in 1984); In Memory Of... (1985); Quiet City (1986); Piccolo Balletto (1986); Ives, Songs (1988); 2 & 3 Part Inventions (1994), and West Side Story Suite (1995). The Jerome Robbins Chamber Dance Company completed an acclaimed tour of the People's Republic of China, sponsored in 1981 by the U.S. Communications Agency.

During this extraordinary, prolific career, Mr. Robbins served on the National Council on the Arts from 1974 to 1980, and the New York State Council on the Arts/Dance Panel from 1973 to 1988. He established and partially endowed the Jerome Robbins Film Archive of the Dance Collection of the New York City Public Library at Lincoln Center. His numerous awards and academic honors included the Handel Medallion of the City of New York (1976), the Kennedy Center Honors (1981), three Honorary Doctorates, an honorary membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1985) and in 1988 he was awarded the National Medal of the Arts.

Mr. Robbins died at the height of his creative powers. Most importantly, he brought joy, emotional involvement and humorous pleasure to millions of people, not only in the United States, but throughout the entire world. His work will continue to exist and delight us.

Copyright 1998-2004 New York City Ballet

CHRISTOPHER STOWELL
Christopher Stowell became Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Artistic Director in 2003.  His vision and leadership have cultivated a company with a strong classical foundation and a commitment to fostering new work and promoting live music.  Since his arrival, Mr. Stowell has expanded both the dancer roster and the length of the performance season, and has made major additions to the OBT repertoire: including masterpieces by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and Jerome Robbins; works by contemporary choreographers such as Lar Lubovitch, Paul Taylor and Christopher Wheeldon; and world premiere ballets by James Kudelka, Trey McIntyre, Julia Adam and Yuri Possokhov.  Mr. Stowell’s own contributions to the repertoire include Adin, Eyes On You and OBT’s first full-length Swan Lake.

Mr. Stowell was born in New York City and received his training at Pacific Northwest Ballet School and the School of American Ballet.  In 1985 he joined San Francisco Ballet where he danced for sixteen years, appearing in theaters throughout the world including the Paris Opera, New York’s Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.  As a principal dancer, Mr. Stowell performed leading roles in the full-length classics Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and Othello, and had roles created for him by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson and by contemporary choreographers including Mark Morris, William Forsythe and James Kudelka.  An established interpreter of the George Balanchine repertoire, Mr. Stowell appeared in almost every Balanchine ballet performed by SFB.  Upon his retirement, he was accorded a gala farewell in the War Memorial Opera House. 

In recent years, Mr. Stowell has taught and coached in San Francisco, New York, Japan and Europe.  He has created new works for San Francisco Ballet, Pennsylvania Ballet, Diablo Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet, as well as the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute.  He has also staged the works of George Balanchine and Mark Morris.

CHRISTOPHER WHEELDON
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