Ballet Imperial

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine (1904-1983) is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. At Balanchine’s behest, the School of American Ballet was founded in 1934, the first product of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration. Several ballet companies directed by the two were created and dissolved in the years that followed, while Balanchine found other outlets for his choreography. Eventually, with a performance on October 11, 1948, New York City Ballet was born. Balanchine served as its ballet master and principal choreographer from 1948 until his death in 1983.

Balanchine’s more than 400 dance works include Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de Cristal, later renamed Symphony in C (1947), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981). His final ballet, a new version of Stravinsky’s Variations for Orchestra, was created in 1982. He also choreographed for films, operas, revues, and musicals. Among his best-known dances for the stage is Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, originally created for Broadway’s On Your Toes (1936). The musical was later made into a movie.

A major artistic figure of the twentieth century, Balanchine revolutionized the look of classical ballet. Taking classicism as his base, he heightened, quickened, expanded, streamlined, and even inverted the fundamentals of the 400-year-old language of academic dance. This had an inestimable influence on the growth of dance in America. Although at first his style seemed particularly suited to the energy and speed of American dancers, especially those he trained, his ballets are now performed by all the major classical ballet companies throughout the world.

Reprinted by permission of The George Balanchine Foundation.

Martin Pakledinaz (1953 – 2012) is an award-winning costume designer for stage, television, and film. He won Tony Awards for Thoroughly Modern Millie and the 2000 revival of Kiss Me Kate, which also earned him the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design. His extensive Broadway credits include Grease, The Pirate Queen, The Pajama Game, The Trip to Bountiful, Wonderful Town, The Boys From Syracuse, The Diary Of Anne Frank, A Year With Frog And Toad, The Life, Anna Christie, The Father, Golden Child, and the current production of Anything Goes. His off-Broadway work includes Two Gentlemen of Verona, Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, Kimberly Akimbo, Give Me Your Answer Do, Juvenalia, The Misanthrope, Kevin Kline’s Hamlet, Twelve Dreams, Waste, and Troilus and Cressida. He has designed for leading regional theaters in the United States and for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden. His designs for opera include works at the New York Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera, as well as opera houses in Seattle, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Sante Fe, Houston, Toronto, Salzburg, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Helsinki, and Gothenburg, among others.

Mr. Pakledinaz’s dance credits include a long collaboration with Mark Morris, and dances for such diverse choreographers as George Balanchine, Eliot Feld, Deborah Hay, Daniel Pelzig, Helgi Tomasson, and Lila York. Since designing the costumes for Kent Stowell’s Cinderella in 1994, he has had an excellent creative relationship with Pacific Northwest Ballet. In 1995, he designed new costumes for Mr. Stowell’s Zirkus Weill. In 1997, with the approval of The George Balanchine Trust, PNB commissioned Mr. Pakledinaz to re-design the entire production of George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—a “first” for a Balanchine story ballet.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) studied at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, where George Balanchine later studied piano in addition to his studies in dance. Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular and influential of all romantic composers. His work is expressive, melodic, and grand in scale, characterized by rich orchestrations. His output was prodigious and included chamber works, symphonies, concerti for various instruments, operas, and works for the piano. His works for the ballet include Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, the latter two composed in close collaboration with choreographer Marius Petipa.

Balanchine had a special affinity for Tchaikovsky. “In everything that I did to Tchaikovsky’s music,” he told an interviewer, “I sensed his help. It wasn’t real conversation. But when I was working and saw that something was coming of it, I felt that it was Tchaikovsky who had helped me.”

Randall G. Chiarelli (1949-2024) devoted his career to lighting for dance, much of it at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and also for American Ballet Theatre, Royal New Zealand Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, Houston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, among others. His many collaborators included choreographers Donald Byrd, Mark Dendy, Ronald Hynd, Kent Stowell, Susan Stroman, and Christopher Wheeldon. Chiarelli graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in painting and sculpture.