Lincoln Kirstein, Modern Dance, and the Left: The Genesis of an American Ballet
2005; Edinburgh University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3366/drs.2005.23.1.18
ISSN1750-0095
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoBallet Caravan, the short-lived chamber company founded by Lincoln Kirstein1 in 1936, is mostly remembered as a high-minded but misguided experiment in presenting ballets by Americans on American subjects. With the exception of Billy the Kid (1938), which teamed Eugene Loring with composer Aaron Copland on the first of the latter's Americana classics, and to a lesser extent the Lew ChristensenVirgil Thomson-Paul Cadmus collaboration, Filling Station (1937), the repertoire did not outlast the company's five-year existence. To be sure, aspects of the enterprise proved more lasting. The 'seasoning' of a generation of young American dancers, the discovery of a generation of new American choreographers, and the tapping in New York and on the road of an educated, sophisticated audience all contributed to the ballet 'boom' of the 1940s and the strong American presence in companies such as Ballet Theatre, Ballet International, and the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Ballet Caravan survived in part because of Kirstein's willingness to associate the company with institutions and practices peripheral to ballet. The first of these was modern dance, which helped establish the company's American identity. Ballet Caravan made its debut at the Bennington College Summer School of the Dance,2 performed at the 92nd Street Y,3 Washington Irving High School (in the Student Dance Recitals series),4 Dance International,5 and the New School for Social Research (in its lecture-demonstration series 'The Dance in the Social Scene')6 all venues closely associated with modern dance. It shared a booking agent (Frances Hawkins) with Martha Graham, a season in 1939 at the St. James Theatre that all but coincided with the debut of Ballet Theatre,7 and something of a common thrust if not a common technique: Billy the Kid and Graham's American Document the greatest American-themed works of the late 1930s premiered within two months of each other. By 1937-1938 Kirstein had become a frequent contributor to Louis Horst's Dance Observer, the house organ, so to speak, of mainstream modern dance, and photographs of Ballet Caravan dancers appeared several times on the journal's cover.8 Perhaps not unexpectedly, Kirstein's Blast at Ballet, which savaged ballet directors and ballet patrons, while insisting on the need for an American style' in ballet, was applauded in modern dance circles. Assessing what went wrong with Ballet
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