Throughout the history of dance, there has been an extensive list of collaborations that we can look back on today and use as a model of ingenuity and inspiration. The relationships that are established through these collaborations are important because it allows two or more individuals to work together to share their unique ideas and skills with one another to achieve a common goal and make something more extraordinary that cannot generally be attained just with one’s own abilities. In my opinion, one of the most significant collaborations of all time, in the dance world, has been the partnership of George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky.
George Balanchine, Russian born dancer and choreographer, is without a doubt one of the most influential individuals of the dance world. He had started dabbling in choreographing when he was still a young student, but his choreographic career really started to take off when Sergei Diaghilev took Balanchine under his wing and made him chief choreographer of Ballet Russes in 1924. In the earlier part of his career, Balanchine’s ballet consisted mostly of acrobatics, angular movements, dangling bodies, and suggestive poses. However, in the late 1920s his style and vision changed drastically.
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In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev attended a concert in which Stravinsky had composed a brilliant orchestral piece which Diaghilev was wildly impressed with. He could see Stravinsky potential as a composer and asked him to work with Ballet Russes for their summer season. When the 1910 season came around for Ballet Russes, Stravinsky was asked to work for them again, but this time he took on a much bigger role which was commissioning a score for a full-length ballet. From then on, Stravinsky regularly created new compositions for the ballets created by choreographers of the Ballet