#Repost @alastair.macaulay ・・・ 3B: George Balanchine: photograph by George Platt Lynes, 1941. I’ve been preparing my February 5 Lincoln Kirstein lecture for the Centre for Ballet and the Arts on “Ashton and Balanchine: Parallel Lives”: it will take place, very early evening, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Bruno Walter Auditorium. George Balanchine and Frederick Ashton were friends and rivals from the 1930s to the 1980s. It was only on Ashton’s advice in 1950 that Balanchine’s “Serenade” was dressed in skirts beneath the knee; Balanchine and Ashton both choreographed for Lydia Lopokova, Alexandra Danilova, Alicia Markova, Nicholas Magallanes, Tanaquil Le Clercq, Robert Barnett, Jacques D’Amboise, Diana Adams, Svetlana Beriosova, Rudolf Nureyev, Gelsey Kirkland. The two men watched each other’s work like hawks, took steps from each other, and expanded classicism in ballet more than any other choreographers in the twentieth century or since. The last time I saw him, February 25, 1988, Ashton told me how he had started to read Gelsey Kirkland’s autobiography, “Dancing on my Grave”, and, when she wrote disparagingly of Balanchine, he threw the book across the room and never opened it again: “He made her a star!” January 1, 2018.

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