11/1/2022 0 Comments City girl life skills max![]() ![]() Fear, in his mind, of recrimination in theirs, of association and disappearing into a Soviet night. In the eyes of the state, Balanchine was a traitor, and a curtain of fear had fallen between him and his family. By now, Andrei was a well-known composer in Georgia, but his life had nonetheless been constrained by the harsh realities of Soviet existence-and by his brother’s American success. Although he was younger than George, he looked like an old man.Īndrei, who lived in Tbilisi, had followed the path of their father, Meliton Balanchivadze, a Georgian composer who had spent his career collecting traditional Georgian music and forging a style influenced by it. At fifty-seven, Andrei was already gray, and next to his dapper sibling he appeared aged and shy, in a rumpled suit with drooping, oversized pockets (stuffed with tobacco, cigarette papers, and homemade filters composed of cotton and sugar). He was surprised that Andrei was so short, and it was true that Balanchine, who thought of himself as small, seemed to tower over him. ![]() They had not seen each other for some forty years, since the Revolution had torn their family apart. “Andruska! It’s you,” he said, as they embraced, and his expression softened with emotion. He had seen his brother Andrei, who was standing patiently to one side, waiting. (Who could say exactly what “Agon” was about?) Balanchine flashed his American passport in case anyone didn’t get the message. #CITY GIRL LIFE SKILLS MAX FREE#In the U.S.S.R., such abstraction was still deemed a political threat, a slippery artistic form dangerously free of any fixed meaning that could be approved or censored. Balanchine had pushed classical technique and the human body to new physical extremes, especially in his recent plotless dances, “Agon” (1957) and “Episodes” (1959), performed in simple practice clothes on an empty stage. Stalin’s doctrine of socialist realism had long defined art in the U.S.S.R., and in dance this meant lavish narrative “drambalets,” often with socialist themes. It was Cold War code: culturally, the war was being fought in part on the battlefield of abstraction, and Balanchine was taking a defining role. ![]() The sparring began immediately: “Welcome to Russia, home of classical ballet,” one of his hosts began, and Balanchine proudly responded, “No, Russia is home of Romantic ballet, America is the home of classical ballet,” by which he meant his modern ballet. A full-court reception awaited him, with klieg lights, flashing cameras, Soviet officials, American diplomats, and a press corps eager to record his return. When they landed at Sheremetyevo, Balanchine emerged from the Jetway in a suit and bow tie, a trenchcoat draped casually over his arm. Balanchine had also asked that they please dress well, since he wanted his company to present an elegant image. The dancers had stocked up on peanut butter, candy, tuna, Spam, toilet paper, and other necessities. It was his own counter-revolutionary place, an alternative vision of the twentieth century. filled him with dread, and his return brought to light one of the great themes of his life: he had set his own path away from the Marxist materialism of the Bolshevik Revolution, and quietly built, in N.Y.C.B., a village of angels and a music-filled monument to faith and unreason, to body and beauty and spirit. Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, during the reign of the last tsar, he had experienced cold and starvation in revolutionary Russia, before fleeing the country, in 1924, going first to Europe and then, in 1933, to America. The party numbered around ninety, including the dancers, the conductor Robert Irving, two mothers (escorting underage dancers), several translators, the company doctor, and the company’s co-founder and artistic director, George Balanchine. On October 6, 1962, the members of New York City Ballet boarded a plane in Vienna, bound for Moscow, the first stop on an eight-week tour that had been arranged by the State Department. ![]()
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