Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen (review)

In 1915, less than twenty years before Russian choreographer George Balanchine arrived in the US, literary critic Van Wyck Brooks observed that antithetical "twin values" of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" still divided every aspect of American life. Between the two brows, Brooks concluded, there was "no genial middle ground."¹ For ballet in early twentieth-century America, this seemed particularly true. Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova and the touring offshoots of Sergei Diaghilev's Paris-based Ballets Russes had convinced many Americans that, in contrast to the popular dancing on American stages, classical dance came from afar and on high. Yet a growing number of dance scholars are revealing the crevices in this dichotomy.² Musicologist and dance historian James Steichen joins them with a richly researched and gracefully written book on the tangled origins of the New York City Ballet (NYCB) and its associated School of American Ballet. Steichen illuminates the collision of aesthetic and economic concerns driving Balanchine and his sponsor–benefactor Lincoln Kirstein in the first seven years (1933–40) of their now-fabled quest to create an American ballet institution. This period of "missteps, overlooked achievements, and unsung heroes," Steichen argues, is no less important to understanding American theater dance than the mature Balanchine ballets it eventually spawned (Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, 11). Steichen's account of these two remarkably persistent modernists stands to correct the received history that has "papered over" their endeavor's inauspicious origins (8). Scholars and students of American culture will find here a narrative that weaves dance history into theater, music, and film from a remarkable trove of materials, reminding us just how much positivist work still awaits historians of American dance.

Titling Balanchine and Kirstein's project an "enterprise" fittingly acknowledges the crossed purposes in their effort to institutionalize ballet in America. An enterprise, after all, suggests something sleek, commercial, market-driven, and risky—something antithetical to any elite aesthetic sensibilities these self-proclaimed modernists might have coveted. Noting the absence of this foundational conflict in the legend and lore of the NYCB's founding, Steichen rejects the temptation of "triumphant teleology" and "retrospective coherence" in exchange for a more warts-and-all look at the initial American Ballet's first staggers and stumbles (11, 7). Drawing extensively from the popular press and numerous archives, Steichen makes good storytelling of Kirstein's colorful diaries and correspondence. A thorough literature review in the introduction; images of rehearsals, programs, and promotional materials; and meticulously sourced notes all add up to a volume of scholarly precision that deliberately avoids any deep dive into cultural analysis.³ The pragmatic year-by-year chapter titles are perhaps a sign of missed opportunities to weave more thematic reflections into the tale. Beginning and ending with thoughts on Serenade's place in the development of the symphonic ballet (unquestionably a signature achievement of Balanchine's), chapter three, for instance, might have developed this topic just enough to warrant a title more pledged to its purpose than "1934–1935."

Yet the chronological arc and orderly delivery of Steichen's material has clear merits. Chapter one weaves the early biographies of Balanchine and Kirstein into the network of associates (Romola Nijinsky, Virgil Thomson, Chick Austin, Edward Warburg) who helped to bring Balanchine first to Hartford and then to New York City, where their "exhilarating and haphazard journey" of failures and contradictions began (4). As we see in Kirstein's diaries and correspondence—like the newsy October 1933 letter to his mother reporting that his "ballet people" were about to arrive in New York—his machinations with well-to-do Americans set the stage for the enterprise's start (18). Chapter two traces the first two performances of the American Ballet: one ill-fated exhibition at the White Plains estate of patron Edward Warburg, and a more successful showing at the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford. The ballets produced for these debuts (Mozartiana, Errante, Dreams, Transcendence, Serenade, and the football-themed Alma Mater) reveal the...