TERRY TE t\CHOUT
187
he knew that no work of art can be truly major unless it aspires
to
the
condition of permanence.
All this has changed radically, and the man responsible for changing
it was L.incoln Kirstein. As Nancy Reynolds observes in an essay about
Kirstein included in L.ynn Garafola's
The Ballets Rlisses L7lld Its World
(1999),
the co-founder of New York City Ballet dreamed of becoming a
second Diaghilev. Unlike Diaghilev, though, Kirstein had the wit to real–
ize that in George Balanchine, he had found a choreographer of
unprecedcnted genius whose ballets were not only of permanent inter–
est, but complete in and of themsclves. Thcy required no elaborate
backdrops by world-fa mous pa inters, nor fin ishing touches from will fu I
impresarios who longed to poke thcir busy fingers in the creative pie.
Howcver reluctantly, Kirstein made it his life's work
to
let Balanchine be
Balanchinc. "Pcoplc don't realize the spccific way in which Gcorge ran
the company," he admitted in old age. "There was nothing except what
he wished."
Balanchine did not make his ballets with an eye on posterity, and
affected to believe that they would not long outlivc him, at least not in
any rccognizable form. But he and Kirstein also founded NYCB and the
School of Amcrican Ballet, which exist to preserve authcntic versions of
Ba la nch ine's ba Ilets a nd teach the tcch n iques neccssa ry
to
da nce them
idiomatically, and he also made his ballets available
to
other companies
that wished
to
pcrform them.
In
addition, he left the rights
to
thosc bal–
lets not
to
NYCB but
to
fourteen individuals-dancers, close friends,
and colleagues-who in turn depositcd them in the Balanchine Trust,
which supervises all authorized productions of thc scventy-five-odd sur–
viving ballets it controls.
The Balanchine Trust was nor Balanchine's idea: it was organizcd
after his death by his legatees and loyal disciples, several of whom
fanned out across the United States and startcd ballet companies of their
own.
In
,1ddition, a number of dancers have written books about him,
the latest and most ambitious of which is
S/lki Schm'er on Ba/anchine
Techniq/le
(1999).
Schorcr, an NYCB alumna who now tcaches at the
School of American Ballet, is the daughter of the literary scholar Mark
Schorer, so it is no surprise that she should have produced so pcnetrat–
ing and lucidly written an analysis of Balanchine's methods. But for all
its plain-spoken practicality,
Su/::i Schorer on Ba/anchine Techniq/le
is
hardly less interesting for the light it sheds on the near-devotional rcv–
erence Ba
Ia
nch ine inspi red in his da ncers: