Making Ballet American

Reviews / Votes

Essential reading for anyone studying ballet in the twentieth century, Americanism in dance, and the institutional structures that have shaped the concert dance world to this day. * Theatre Survey * With this book, her first, Harris (Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison) makes an important contribution to analyses of 20th-century American ballet. She positions American ballet, especially the neoclassical works of George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet, within broad international contexts--artistic, cultural, political, and social developments during the period from the Depression through the Cold War. Her method is to alternate chapters and interchapters. The chapters complicate the development of American ballet modernism by using detailed critical study of the writings of Balanchine's sponsor Lincoln Kirstein and dance critic Edwin Denby. The interchapters provide close readings of the American ballets Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Western Symphony (1954). These help anchor the more theoretical writing in specific danced examples. * Choice * Andrea Harris's Making Ballet American is a remarkable tale of two men - Kirstein, the brilliant ballet entrepreneur, and Denby, the poet of dance critics - who, together and separely, championed Balanchine's neoclassicism as the cynosure of American ballet. But the book's historical synthesis is even more gripping, focusing on how modernist artists and thinkers from all walks of American culture confronted the deep, underlying fears of the twentieth century: mass media's potential to create unthinking mobs in the guise of fascism, totalitarianism, and even unbridled capitalism. At last, a critical intellectual history of twentieth-century ballet in America - one that is particularly resonant in our time, and full of irony, as individuals initially driven by countercultural and nonconformist values erect elite institutions guaranteed to quash alternative voices! * Joellen Meglin, Dance Chronicle *