Curator, Jodi Hauptman: This footage shows Ballet Society, a forerunner of New York City Ballet. The dancers are rehearsing The Four Temperaments, a signature work by George Balanchine. On the wall nearby are costume designs by Kurt Seligmann, which were worn in early performances of this ballet.
Adrian Danchig-Waring: I’m Adrian Danchig-Waring. I’m a Principal Dancer at the New York City Ballet and the director of the New York Choreographic Institute. The Four Temperaments is one of the first Balanchine ballets I ever danced.
Balanchine was very much an experimentalist. He stripped away all of the narrative components and all of the ornamentation. He was very keen to show off the human body as an instrument.
I mean, the Balanchine works really illustrate the way that ballet is a sport. And so, all the energy that you put into running across a field is manifest in this more cultivated way. And so there's this latent explosive energy within the dancing body.
And Balanchine also famously said that there are no new steps, just new combinations. And so within this film you see Classical Ballet reconstructed. We have the traditional French names for all of those steps, it's just the angles at which they are being attacked and the combination in which they’re unfolding was new, and still feels new. It's…it’s radical.
Jodi Hauptman: To hear more about Kirstein and Balanchine, enter 3244 or, on your phone, MoMA.org/a3244.