James Steichen, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), ISBN: 978-0-19-060741-8.

Abstract

Apart from those devoted to political power couples, scholarly books with two (and only two) protagonists are relatively hard to come by. While this is not the primary virtue of James Steichen's Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, it is one of the many things that makes the book important for understanding the ways in which artistic development during the period in question (1933-40) thrived on tensioninterpersonal, international, sexual and otherwise. Neither an institutional history nor a 'great man' biography, the book straddles genres in a way reminiscent of George Balanchine's own activitiesmoving between ballet, modern dance, Broadway and the Hollywood musicaltackling some of the same challenges and reaping some of the same rewards. For those who know Lincoln Kirstein chiefly for his shepherding of Americanist ballet both at home and abroad, this book provides a detailed contextualization, emphasizing stylistic diversity and administrative versatility. 1 And for those who associate Balanchine primarily with his latter-day Stravinsky collaborations, it offers an intricate prehistory and a number of on-point correctives. While Kirstein dominates the footnotes, with new source material drawn extensively from the impresario's diaries and personal papers, Balanchine looms larger in the text, for it is his glossy history that Steichen most obviously revises. Though uniformly persuasive, many of these revisions will prove more crucial for dance specialists than for other readers. For example, Steichen makes plain that Serenade, perpetually touted as Balanchine's 'first ballet in America', was not actually presented at the initial public performances of the fledgling American Ballet, founded by Kirstein and Balanchine in 1934; moreover, he argues delightfully that parts of the supposedly austere Serenade (to music by Tchaikovsky) were intentionally and effectively funny for its original audience (56, 79). Steichen's rehabilitation of noted dance critic John Martin as a thoughtful observer rather than a modern-dance partisan should also be taken to heart. Scholars working outside of dance will find much of Steichen's study useful when discussing modernism and its historiography, particularly the cross-fertilization of 'high' and 'low', the mixed messaging of (neo)classical nationalism and, albeit to a lesser extent, questions of race and appropriation.