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  The Balanchine Century. 1904-2004 To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding choreographer George Balanchine, the Mariinsky Theater, together with the State Hermitage, the St Petersburg State Museum of Theater and Musical Arts, the General Consulate of the USA in St Petersburg and the George Balanchine Foundation (New York), with support from Sberbank Russia are presenting a commemorative program entitled The Balanchine Century. 1904-2004. The program consists of an exhibition in the State Hermitage, a conference entitled Balanchine: Past, Present and Future and a series of ballet performances in the Mariinsky Theater. In the context of the ballet program, not only Balanchine's choreography but also the works of his predecessors and followers will be shown. George Balanchine (Georgy Balanchivadze) was born in St Petersburg in 1904. After graduating from the Imperial Theater School, he choreographed dances in drama theaters around Petrograd. In 1924, Balanchivadze left Russia and was taken into Sergey Diaghilev's dance troupe. Later Lincoln Kirstein invited Balanchine to America, where they created a school which became the basis for the celebrated troupe of the New York City Ballet. Balanchine's artistic world combined classical dance and modern ways of thinking, the traditions of the Petersburg ballet with the rhythms of a new age. His style came to be called neo-Classicism and was adopted by many dance masters of the 20th century. The Balanchine exhibition in the foyer of the Hermitage Theater is basically drawn from the collections of the St Petersburg State Museum of Theater and Musical Arts, the A.A. Bakhrushin Central Theater Museum, the St Petersburg Central Archive of Literature and Art, the A.A. Akhmatova Literary and Memorial Museum, the St Petersburg Theater Library, the Russian National Library and the All-Russian Museum of Alexander Pushkin. The exhibition presents previously unpublished unique materials pertaining to the Petersburg/Petrograd period in the life of the choreographer. Archival materials, photographs, theater programs and sketches for productions in which the young Mariinsky Theater dancer began his work as a choreographer of dance scenes all make it possible to experience the age of the 1920's in great detail, an age of unprecedented creative enthusiasm, artistic investigations and experimentation. Visitors can see the dance costumes once worn by Georgy Balanchivadze himself: the costume of Jester in Nikolay Cherepnin's ballet Armida's Pavilion designed by Alexander Benois, and Bacchus in Cesar Pugni's ballet King Candaul. There are also costumes from ballet stars known the world over, such as Mikhail Baryshnikov (the ballet Rubies to music by Igor Stravinsky) and Patricia McBride (the Ballet Imperial to music by Tchaikowsky) performing works created for the New York City Ballet. During his three and a half years of work as a ballet artist in Petrograd, Georgy Balanchivadze witnessed the most important events of the early 1920's and became friends with the most interesting people of the age, among them Anna Akhmatova, whose portrait by Zinaida Serebryakova (1922) is shown in the exhibition. The exhibition features unusually expressive photographs by the famous American photographers Paul Kolnik and Costas, who captured scenes from the productions of the New York City Ballet from the 1970's till the start of the new millennium. Documentary films about George Balanchine and filmed excerpts from his ballets are also shown at the exhibition. |
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