By George!
Ballet Arizona’s Festival strikes a delicate Balanchine
by Chris Moore

VALLEY – The performance marks the end of the season, the movements come from the mind of the master, the program is too big for one show to contain, and the orchestra will be in the pit. By George, that sounds like a Balanchine Festival.

“No one has shaped ballet in America more than George Balanchine,” says Ballet Arizona’s artistic director Ib Andersen. “The special qualities of his creativity, musicality, and theatricality cannot be underestimated. Very few days pass when I do not realize the tremendous effect he’s had on my own art as a choreographer, and it is my hope that this Balanchine Festival will offer to Phoenix some idea of the depth and range of his genius.” 

That depth and range, of the man who is often called “the father of American ballet,” George Balanchine, will be celebrated in two programs balanced over the first four days of June when Ballet Arizona presents its Balanchine Festival at Symphony Hall.

The programs include six of the immortal choreographer’s masterworks: “Serenade,” “Divertimento No. 15,” “Apollo,” “Theme and Variations,” “La Sonnambula” and “Agon.” And it is a fitting tribute that the Phoenix Symphony will be performing the music live, under the baton of Timothy Russell.

“The live orchestra will make a huge, huge difference,” Andersen says. “It will make the experience so much more intense. I think this is going to be the best thing this company has ever done. The company is more ready now than ever, and the ballets don’t come any better than this.”

“There’s never been a choreographer like him. There probably never will be,”Andersen says. “Balanchine is to ballet what Bach is to music. The ultimate.”

After emigrating from his native Russia in 1924 by way of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Ballanchine was a central figure to the establishment of the American Ballet. The Russian later took over and served as ballet master of the New York City Ballet for more than 30 years before his death in 1983.

During his final seven years at the New York City Ballet, the last few of those working closely with his young protégé Ib Andersen, along with Balanchine’s longtime female muse Suzanne Farrell (both of whom are now members of the Balanchine Trust, a select group of people allowed to stage his ballets worldwide), Balanchine added more than dozen pieces to the company’s repertory.

“I was very lucky to be involved in that period when so many new ballets were being choreographed,” says Andersen, who took from those years of tutelage “a knowledge of the ballets and how they’re supposed to be danced.”

Five of the six dances in Ballet Arizona’s Balanchine Festival–the sole exception being “Serenade”–were danced by Andersen himself under the direction of Balanchine at the New York City Ballet during that landmark period.

Balanchine’s impact on the art and history of dance in America cannot be underestimated as it spanned virtually all media–musical theater like “Ziegfeld Follies” and “Cabin in the Sky,” television dance specials including the PBS shows “Dance in America” and “Live from Lincoln Center,” and movies such as the “The Goldwyn Follies” and “Star Spangled Rhythm.” His illustrious career included working relationships with such legendary talents as Jerome Robbins, Martha Graham, Suzanne Farrell and Igor Stravinsky, to name just a few.

One such relationship, Balanchine’s 50‑year collaboration with Russian composer Igor Stravinsky produced many impressive works, not least among them the two which are part of this year’s festival, “Apollo” and “Agon.”

Stravinsky once wrote of Balanchine: “(He) 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.”

And everything has danced down another generation now as Ballet Arizona’s principal dancer Natalia Magnicaballi, who currently studies with both Andersen as a member of Ballet Arizona and with Suzanne Farrell as a principal dancer in her company The Suzanne Farrell Ballet, pirouettes in the steps of those renowned dancers in four of the six ballets in the festival.

“It is an honor for me to be working with Ib Andersen, who was a protégé of the late George Balanchine,” says Magnicaballi. “To work with Ib is as if I’m learning the choreography from Mr. Balanchine himself. It is a very exciting experience.”

“A ballet may contain a story, but the visual spectacle,” Balanchine had written, “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 the magician.”

That’s the delicate balance. The story for the eye. The magic of the dance. And no one, in the history of American dance, no one conceived it more enchantingly than the grand magician himself, George Balanchine.