2005 Chapters (Layout Features)

George Antheil and the Dance (2005)

Garafola, Lynn

This project grew out of a lecture I gave at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in 2000. When I began the research, I knew next to nothing about the composer George Antheil, but the deeper I dug the more fascinating I found him. The first iteration of this research was published as an article entitled "George Antheil and the Dance" in the Fall 2001 issue of "Ballet Review." Two years later I gave a talk on what I called the checkered relationship between the composer and George Balanchine at the George Antheil Festival 2003 in Trenton, New Jersey. As a result of this additional research, I revised the "Ballet Review" essay and included the later version in "Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance," a collection of my essays published by Wesleyan University Press in 2005. The chief difference was an expansion of the material relating to Balanchine, in particular his contribution to an unrealized "Creole ballet" that appears to be indebted to a scenario by Katherine Dunham.