European Ballet Dancers Tour the United States: Malvina Hoffman and Anna Pavlova
While Shinn and Kronberg focused almost exclusively on the spectacle of the theater, American sculptor Malvina Hoffman showed little interest in the sets, costumes, spectators and other trappings of the ballet performance. Her interest lay primarily in the movement of the dance, and she spent years attempting to capture the motions and gestures of the classical ballerina Anna Pavlova in bronze. With her focus on portraying motion, Hoffman serves as a link between artists like Shinn and Kronberg who depicted the spectacle of the ballet in an increasingly old-fashioned aesthetic and the artists of the following chapters who employed modernist aesthetics to convey the modern dancer’s avant-garde movements.
In 1933 Lincoln Kirstein invited George Balanchine, a former dancer and choreographer for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, to relocate to the United States and form a ballet school. Balanchine accepted, opened the School of American Ballet in 1934, formed the American Ballet in 1935, and then in 1948 co-founded with Kirstein the New York City Ballet. As a result of Balanchine’s success, permanent ballet companies were established in cities across the country. Balanchine’s arrival marks the beginning of a continuous tradition of classical ballet dancing in the United States. Beginning in 1735 when Englishman Henry Holt danced in Charleston, South Carolina and continuing until the establishment of Balanchine’s companies, the ballets performed in the United States featured touring European stars.22
22 Coe, Dance in America, 17. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European ballet dancers occasionally performed in the United States for a season. In 1840 the famous Fanny Elssler came to the United States. She was so well received despite the inadequacies of the American theaters and the lack of a trained chorus that she appeared to be creating an audience for
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classical ballet. However, after her departure it would be many years before a European ballet
dancer was as well received in America