Men in Dance
Men have played and continue to play a huge role in the development, history, and style of dance performance. Researching George Balanchine, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, and Savion Glover, I found that each of them contributed to the dance world in different ways.George Balanchine, a Russian-born American choreographer, was one of the foremost choreographers in the history of ballet, particularly in the neoclassical style. He was trained at the Imperial Ballet Academy and studied composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. In 1933 he moved to Paris and organized his own group, "Les Ballets". At the invitation of American ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine then moved to from Paris to New York City and together they founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the American Ballet Company in 1935. While with that company, Balanchine created works for various opera and ballet companies and for musical comedies. After the American Ballet Company dissolved in 1938, Balanchine's work for The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and the famous ballet sequence "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" in On Your Toes (1936) established ballet as a permanent element of the musical. With Kirstein he co founded Ballet Society in 1946, which
Bob Fosse is an American choreographer and stage and film director, admired for his work in Broadway musicals. This compliment speaks of not only his unsurpassed speed and skill as a dancer but his vision of tap, itself. Balanchine's style ranged from classical stagings to choreography for more contemporary and modern composers, including the works of Americans George Gershwin and Richard Rodgers. in 1948 became the New York City Ballet. Through him, ballet in the United States has a direct connection with the Russian classical ballet tradition of celebrated 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa. His revolutionary artistic perception of dance until recently was considered out dated. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 1994. He recently choreographed a work for the Washington Society for the Performing Arts in association with the NEA and has just received an Endowment Grant for Choreography, making him the youngest person in NEA history to receive this honor. Balanchine is considered the foremost representative of neoclassicism in ballet. In 1988, Savion co-starred in the film Tap with Mr. Under Balanchine's direction, the company became one of the world's great performing groups, with a repertory consisting largely of his ballets. In the 1980s he received two prestigious life achievement awards, one from the Kennedy Center (1982) and one from the American Film Institute (1985). He appeared on Broadway opposite Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam and toured with that show.
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