Centennials (continued)

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER brought art to Boston and created a unique building to house it. George Balanchine brought ballet to America and created a unique company to perform it. Like the Gardner Museum, Balanchine is celebrating his centennial this year, and though dance, unlike the art that Mrs. Gardner collected, is a transitory form, his genius nonetheless illuminates "George Balanchine: A Life’s Journey in Ballet," which is up at Harvard University’s Pusey Library through May 28. Put together by Harvard Theatre Collection curator Fredric Woodbridge Wilson and dance historian (and Phoenix contributor) Iris Fanger, it gathers letters, contracts, telegrams, programs, posters, photographs, manuscripts, set designs, costumes, and the odd toe shoe. The curators had the George Balanchine Papers, which he left to Harvard after his death in 1983, at their disposal, but they also delved into the Harvard Theatre Collection archives to bring to life one of the most original, and enjoyable, artistic minds of the 20th century.

"I taught what I learned as a child in St. Petersburg at the Maryinsky School." That’s the deceptively simple statement that starts off one case of exhibits in an outer room of the show, and it’s a reminder that artistic achievements have technical foundations. Mr. B’s foundation is laid in the second-innermost room of the show, where you’ll find letters from his parents, the 1924 contract, in old-spelling Russian, between Diaghilev and "Georgii M[elitonovich] Balanchivadze," and a 1929 souvenir program for the Ballets Russes with a photo of the handsome 25-year-old "Georges" Balanchine. The innermost room records his early experiences on Broadway and in Hollywood: Babes in Arms, I Was an Adventuress (set to music from Swan Lake), The Goldwyn Follies, The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, On Your Toes (which included Slaughter on Tenth Avenue), Louisiana Purchase, and much more, with posters and photographs. The room also houses Al Hirschfeld’s New York Times drawing of an impossibly long and leggy Galina Panova as Vera Barnova in the 1983 revival of On Your Toes plus his color lithograph of Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell — even longer and leggier, if that’s possible, in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. The latter is accompanied by a 1968 Martha Swope photo of Mitchell and Farrell in rehearsal with Mr. B, who appears to have both hands around Suzanne’s throat. Two programs of music that Balanchine used alternate; I caught the slow movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto (Concerto Barocco) and the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings (Serenade).

Balanchine was also founding the School of American Ballet, whose first performances included the 1933 version of Mozartiana (there’s a photo of Heidi Vosseler and Hortense Korklyn) and the curiosity Alma Mater, which draws on the Ralph Henry Barbour novels Stover at Yale and Winning Your Y for its story. After the heroics of the star halfback, the program tells us, "Snake dance is a rah-rah bacchanale, not even the goalposts left standing." It gets stranger when he falls in love: "No sooner met than married, and to the triumphant march which hailed him on the gridiron, he weds his pantied pride." But no stranger than George Lyne Platt’s studio photograph of a fully clothed Balanchine with an apparently unclothed (they’re in shadow from the waist down) Nicholas Magallanes and Marie-Jeanne. Next to that, you’ll find Melton-Pippin’s photograph of Mr. B and his cat Mourka. And in the adjoining Theatre Collection lobby, there’s the color poster for Ballet of the Elephants, which the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus commissioned from Balanchine; set to Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka, it was presented April 9, 1942, at Madison Square Garden, with Vera Zorina (then Mrs. B) riding "prima ballerina" Modoc, who was a famous performer in her own right.

The letters offer their own hilarious moments. Writing on September 2, 1959, Sergei Denham of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo proposes that George and he "have lunch together and reminisce of the days when we were both naughty children." What he really has on his mind, however, is "restoring to our repertoire your ballets Serenade and Concerto Barocco. Morally and legally we have all the right to do so." Still, he wants Balanchine’s blessing. What’s more, he’s eager, he says, to "uphold the virginity of your choreography," and to that end he proposes hiring Vida Brown to set the pieces. Balanchine replied a week later that "I don’t eat lunch because of cholesterol and gout. If you feel that you have a moral and legal right to mount my ballets Serenade and Concerto Barocco, I suppose the only moral right left to me is to collect royalties. My royalty fee is fifty dollars per performance." He adds that he has no objection to their hiring Vida Brown as long as they’re willing to pay her: "She usually gets five hundred dollars per ballet when she teaches my ballets to other companies."

Mr. B and Barbra? It wasn’t his fault they didn’t collaborate. In her letter of September 26, 1975, Streisand thanks Mr. B for his invitation to sing Anna I in a revival of The Seven Deadly Sins (Lotte Lenya had the role in the 1958 original) but says, "Right now I am totally committed to my homelife and my family until January 1976, when production begins on my new film [A Star Is Born]." More poignant, and painful, is the letter Suzanne Farrell wrote to Balanchine on November 7, 1973. "Even though you say you don’t remember Meditation [a work he choreographed for her and Jacques d’Amboise in 1963], I’d like you to come, if you want. Mr. Béjart, too, would be so honored. . . . In any event, thank you . . . and my performance of Meditation December 19th will be for you. Love, Suzi."

Like the canals of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venice, the show holds surprises at every turn. A program for the premiere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream — January 17, 1962 — lists Edward Villella as Oberon, Melissa Hayden as Titania, and Arthur Mitchell as Puck; but if you look farther down, among "Titania’s handmaidens," you’ll find Farrell’s name. The program for the fledgling Boston Ballet Company on January 12, 1966, lists Balanchine as the "artistic advisor" (E. Virginia Williams is the "artistic director"). His Allegro Brillante is on the program, with NCYB’s Sara Leland and Earle Sieveling (both of whom started with Boston Ballet) dancing and Gordon Boelzner at the piano; it’s a reminder of his generosity to other companies. Some of the photographs are iconic — Edward Villella and Allegra Kent in Bugaku; Farrell in Tzigane; Mikhail Baryshnikov doing the signature opening leap from Prodigal Son — but there are plenty of less familiar shots, like Mr. B playing Drosselmeier in The Nutcracker and talking with Farrell during the 1966 filming of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Boston Ballet artistic director Mikko Nissinen has contributed a 1985 Basel Ballet photo of himself and Amanda Bennet in the Phlegmatic section of The Four Temperaments.

Not everything Balanchine touched turned to gold. Of his songs, the only one known to have been published is "The World Is Turning Fast," but the one whose words and lyrics we get a look at here is "Last Night I Dreamt." Then there are unrealized projects like his "Audubon and Appleseed: An American Dream," a ballet he and Lincoln Kirstein wanted to base on Audubon’s Birds of America. It sounds like a terrible idea, but who’s to say the man who made America his ballet ark and floated it all over the world couldn’t have pulled it off.