A revolutionary choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine (1904-1983), is considered to be the “father of American ballet.” His technique, characterized by intense speed, emphasis on lines, and unorthodox arm positions, is highly recognizable and has left an indelible mark on the ballet world. Prestigious ballet companies in the United States continue to perform Balanchine’s works, including Jewels, Serenade, and Western Symphony, striving to continue his legacy. Although there has been a significant amount of scholarship on Balanchine and his ballets, there is a critical lack of scholarship related to books written about him. Many of these works have been written by dancers with whom he worked closely, providing an alternative venue for disseminating Balanchine technique and providing key insight into Balanchine’s collaborative process with dancers and composers. In addition, there is also an opportunity to engage with these materials using text analysis, providing additional means to uncover potential connections within this unique body of literature.
This poster presentation endeavors to shed light on the early stages of a comprehensive textual analysis of a corpus of English-language books and literature on George Balanchine and his technique. The objectives of this project are threefold: to assess the consistency with which Balanchine's unique style has been transmitted through textual mediums, to uncover and identify additional collaborations with dancers and composers currently not documented within Balanchine scholarship, and to explore how his illustrious career is perceived through the eyes of those who collaborated with him, particularly through the lens of works authored by dancers who worked under Balanchine.
This project employs a highly interdisciplinary approach that combines established methodologies in dance studies and musicology with well-established text analysis techniques. Prior to conducting the analytical component of the project, preliminary research was conducted, including selecting works to use for the corpus, identifying key figures and collaborators that were already documented in existing Balanchine literature. The initial stage of the project was exploratory, conducting a word frequency analysis to establish common words and ideas that appeared throughout the corpus. This poster presentation aims to highlight this early stage as well as the second stage of the project, in which three analyses are being conducted: sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and network analysis. The analytical component of this project is being done with Python, utilizing natural language processing libraries such as the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and spacy, the topic modeling library Gensim, and the visualization library seaborn. By employing these tools, this project intends to uncover patterns, themes, and nuances in this corpus of Balanchine literature that may have gone unnoticed through traditional means.
The significance of this research lies in its potential to deepen our understanding of Balanchine's impact on the world of ballet, not just from a choreographic perspective, but also from the standpoint of those who experienced his artistic genius firsthand. Through the amalgamation of qualitative and quantitative analyses, the project seeks to offer a nuanced portrayal of Balanchine's contributions, highlighting aspects of his life and work that may have been overshadowed in the broader discourse. Furthermore, this study aims to inspire future research initiatives that delve deeper into the multifaceted legacy of George Balanchine.