Popular Balanchine dossiers

1927-2004 D

Popular Balanchine was designed to document the works choreographed by George Balanchine for the popular stage and the movie screen. From 1927 to 1931, Balanchine staged dances and musical numbers for revues, variety shows, and operettas in London and Paris as well as creating choreography for Dark Red Roses, among one of the earliest feature-length talking motion pictures made in England. In the United States, from 1936 to 1954, he worked with Vernon Duke, John Murray Anderson, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, George Abbott, George Gershwin, Joshua Logan, Frederick Loewe, Irving Berlin, John Latouche, Felix Brentano, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, and Harold Arlen - leading figures of American musical theater - to create two revues, fourteen musical comedies, four operettas, and five Hollywood films that are among the milestones of American popular culture. He also collaborated with Igor Stravinsky on the famous Ballet of the Elephantsfor Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Of Balanchine’s enormous choreographic output, these popular works have received far less critical and scholarly attention than have his ballets, but we recognize today that they are an important part of his oeuvre and that they are, indeed, significant works in terms of America’s cultural heritage.

To preserve what is possible of this heritage, the George Balanchine Foundation undertook a major research initiative in 1999, realizing that it was time to focus on Balanchine’s popular works, while some of the people involved with these productions - onstage, backstage, and in the audience - were still alive. Nancy Reynolds, director of research for the foundation, originated the project and engaged Claude Conyers as project director. The mandate given him was to establish and supervise a team of dance and theater historians to research, assemble, and organize a collection of primary source materials on Mr. Balanchine’s popular work. The results of this effort, conducted over a period of five years, constitute a unique collection of documents, printed materials, photographs, memorabilia, audio and video recordings, and transcripts of interviews with participants in a major period in the history of American musical theater.

Summary of Research Methods

Popular Balanchine was directed by Claude Conyers, a former publishing executive, who functioned as chief administrator of the project as well as director of research. Since the project covered a diverse body of material and required particular skill in doing original research, he was able to model it on similar projects in scholarly and professional reference publishing, adapting systems and procedures used in the development and production of large-scale historical dictionaries and encyclopedias to the documentation of popular theatrical works.

On behalf of the George Balanchine Foundation, Mr. Conyers formed a multi-tiered team of dance and theater historians and scholars to research and document some thirty-five productions that George Balanchine choreographed