Men in Dance
Men have played and continue to play a huge role in the development, history, and style of dance performance. Researching George Balanchine, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, and Savion Glover, I found that each of them contributed to the dance world in different ways.George Balanchine, a Russian-born American choreographer, was one of the foremost choreographers in the history of ballet, particularly in the neoclassical style. He was trained at the Imperial Ballet Academy and studied composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. In 1933 he moved to Paris and organized his own group, "Les Ballets". At the invitation of American ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine then moved to from Paris to New York City and together they founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the American Ballet Company in 1935. While with that company, Balanchine created works for various opera and ballet companies and for musical comedies. After the American Ballet Company dissolved in 1938, Balanchine's work for The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and the famous ballet sequence "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" in On Your Toes (1936) established ballet as a permanent element of the musical. With Kirstein he co founded Ballet Society in 1946, which
Kelly received a special Academy Award in 1951 for his contributions to motion picture choreography. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1960. In the 1980s he received two prestigious life achievement awards, one from the Kennedy Center (1982) and one from the American Film Institute (1985). He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 1994. While all of these dancers that I have mentioned have had very formal dance training in ballet, there are some that contribute to dance that lack such a strong background...they just do what they do well. Savion Glover, one of the youngest men to be nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in Black and Blue, is 21 years old. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he made his Broadway debut as the title character in The Tap Dance Kid at the age of 12. He appeared on Broadway opposite Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam and toured with that show. In 1988, Savion co-starred in the film Tap with Mr. Hines and Sammy Davis, Jr. On television he has appeared in Dance in America: Tap! with Mr. Hines and Tommy Tune for PBS and Nickelodeon, The Academy Awards, Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame and is currently a series regular on Sesame Street. He has also danced in a tribute to the Nicholas Brothers on The Kennedy Center Honors for CBS. His dancing and choreography in An American in Paris (1951) were acclaimed as outstanding examples of film ballet, as was his performance of Richard Rodgers's "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" ballet in Words and Music (1948). Kelly's work also includes the all-dance film Invitation to the Dance (1956) and the jazz ball
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