Word: kirstein
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Personal Vision. Balanchine, who lives pleasantly on royalties that reach $20,000 in a good year, has been working without salary, but he pays his dancers well over union scale. His selflessness is highly purposeful; a choreographer, he says, has to "use people." Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine's patron and the general director of the company, calls him "Oriental, impersonal, even sinister," but points out that "Balanchine has imposed his personal vision on the world of theatrical dancing." This is quite a trick, for ballet, according to Kirstein, "has become a means for the extreme release of physical and mental...
...Kirstein who brought Balanchine to New York in 1933. As a wealthy young esthete at Harvard, he was a founder of the highbrow magazine Hound and Horn and Harvard's Society for Contemporary Art; but by the year of his graduation (1929), he had become a heartstruck balletomane. After seeing Balanchine's Les Ballets 1933 in Paris, Kirstein persuaded the young Russian to bring the U.S. "a new art." In the 30 years since then, he has been Balanchine's unfailing champion, and has spent more than $750,000 of his own money* to commission new music...
...Kirstein is almost as intimately involved with the hopeful results of the Ford grants as is Balanchine: he is founder and director of the school and general director of the ballet company. Kirstein always intended the school to be national. "That has been my dream for 30 years," he says. Now, with its munificent grant, the school can pick and choose among the best students. "This almost approaches the Soviet system, which subsidizes not only the student but the student's family," says Kirstein. "It won't produce instant ballet, but it will give the ballet stability...
...dance world. The American Ballet Theater got nothing; nor did the entire field of modern dance. And though the foundation patiently announced that a grant to ballet did not preclude future grants to modern dance, this did not smooth the ruffled fur. "People stop me on the street," says Kirstein, "and tell me I'm taking bread out of their mouths...
...inherited his wealth from his father, Louis Kirstein, philanthropist and vice president of Boston's Filene's department store until his death...