George Balanchine

In this centennial of the birth of George Balanchine, there's no shortage of news about celebrations of his choreographic genius -- or the fortunes of New York City Ballet, the company he co-founded in 1948. Last week alone, the Saratoga Arts Center bowed to financial pressures and ended City Ballet's annual three-week residency there, a relationship that began in 1966. City Ballet artistic director Peter Martins called this cost-cutting measure "disheartening."

Composer Henri Sauguet, best known for his sophisticated but simple ballet scores, among them "Musique des Forains," died at his home in Paris on Thursday after a long illness, his family said. He was 88. Sauguet had been partly paralyzed for two years and had been suffering from heart problems, his son told the Associated Press. Sauguet, who was born Henri Pierre Poupard in Bordeaux but took his mother's maiden name, studied the piano and the organ as a child. After World War I, he moved to Paris and met such other musicians as Charles Koechlin, Darius Milhaud and Erik Satie.

Fifteen years ago, PBS telecast a New York City Ballet performance of "Serenade," part of a German co-production that left George Balanchine utterly discouraged about the artistic distortions of his ballets on television. Eventually, the producers of the new "Dance in America" series persuaded him to collaborate in the shooting of his works, a project that extended through 1983, the year of his death.

George Balanchine would have turned 100 last January, and in celebration of that centennial, this whole year in the ballet world has been a kind of jubilee, with festivals, symposiums, telecasts, tours -- even a new Boris Eifman ballet -- keeping the man's image dancing before our eyes. But Balanchine needs no hoopla to confirm his primacy in 2004.

On a Monday in October, while the other members of New York City Ballet are enjoying their day off, three principals are hard at work in a Lincoln Center studio, making an important connection with the past. Nichol Hlinka, Lourdes Lopez and Nikolaj Hubbe are helping restore life to sections of "Le Baiser de la Fee," a 1937 ballet by George Balanchine not seen since the early 1950s.

When David Gordon first told Mikhail Baryshnikov about the new work he had in mind for American Ballet Theatre, he described it as "Edward Gorey-esque" in content and imagery. Certainly its 19th-Century style, whimsical forms of death and deliberate ambiguity of effect reflected the distinctive sensibility and preoccupations of Gorey's four-dozen hand-lettered, illustrated books and occasional stage projects. Before Gordon knew it, Gorey had been hired to design the production.

New York City Ballet closed its two-venue Southland visit over the weekend with performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that balanced the familiar mastery of early and late works by George Balanchine with the novelty of a recent, splashy kiddie-ballet by resident company choreographer Christopher Wheeldon.

The New York City Ballet will present eight works by its late founding artistic director, George Balanchine, during an Oct. 15-19 engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center--the company's first Southern California visit in 12 years. Repertory for the seven-performance run, which also includes works by ballet masters-in-chief Jerome Robbins and Peter Martins, was announced Friday at a press conference at the Center Tower in Costa Mesa: - Oct.

In the 20 years since the death of George Balanchine, his unprecedented choreographic legacy has been compromised by inevitable stylistic drift and the contradictory agendas of different artistic directors. For instance, the Kirov Ballet (the company that trained him) tries to dance Balanchine as if he never left Russia, while New York City Ballet (the company he co-founded) currently enforces a hard-driven 21st century efficiency in his works.

Bella Lewitzky is a modern dance choreographer with a strong need for connecting to the past. "Without a sense of history, it is impossible to be free to address the future," Lewitzky said in a recent phone interview from her Hollywood Hills home. "Otherwise, one makes a kind of a rootless approach to moving in any focused direction. And like anything without roots, the life is often very temporary."