Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise by James Steichen

In less than a decade, George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had faced challenges and opportunities that neither likely envisioned when they first met in the summer of 1933 in London.  Their collective enterprise had weathered much:  summertime thunderstorms in Westchester county, byzantine politics at the Metropolitan Opera, mediocre reviews and lukewarm audiences, recalcitrant corporate monopolies, and the continued dominance of Russian ballet in the public imagination.
--James Steichen, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise, Oxford University Press 2019.

This detailed but flatly written and overly notated (over a thousand footnotes for 236 pages of text) book comes across like a dissertation, though the author says the work was only "inspired" by his dissertation.  In any case, it's not surprising that a PhD in musicology puts more emphasis on music than dance.  Steichen's book tells us everywhere Balanchine and Kirstein were in the 1930's and more or less what they did but it doesn't go much beyond that; the analyses of the ballets especially do not go very far beyond the superficial.  And there are endless and useless quotes from critics of the time along the lines of "a deeply felt work."  Few critics then or now have been able to write intelligently about ballet; they either can't use standard ballet vocabulary or are not allowed to by their editors.  (By the way, I'm still waiting for Arlene Croce's book on Balanchine.)

Both Kirstein and Balanchine wanted to produce work that was both commercial but of high artistic quality.  While Balanchine worked on Broadway shows and movies with his wife, Vera Zorina, Kirstein took Ballet Caravan to Maine and Georgia.  Balanchine's shows --On Your Toes, Babes in Arms -- were received enthusiastically while the movies he worked on -- like Kirstein's ballet Caravan to the South and the Midwest -- were mostly greeted with incomprehension.  Meanwhile Balanchine's choreography for the American Ballet as part of the Metropolitan Opera were rarely received with enthusiasm by the stuffed shirt opera-goers and the American Ballet was given the boot after three years.

Obviously Steichen can say relatively little about Balanchine's ballets from this period -- only Apollo and Serenade survive  -- but he also falls quite short in his research and commentary on Balanchine's film work, which one can still see.  In the 80's I attended a series of lectures at the 92nd St. Y by Vera Zorina where she showed Balanchine's film choreography and talked about the compromises he was forced to make.  Balanchine was a tremendous admirer of Fred Astaire's (if they ever met there is no record of it) and must have hated having to use Eddie Albert's torso and someone else's legs in the dance numbers of the film version of On Your Toes. And there is almost no financial information divulged in this book, other than the generality that Edward Warburg and Kirstein were financial backers of the American Ballet and the related Ballet Caravan.