Dance as Music in George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco

Abstract

In George Ballanchine’s Concerto Barocco, a neoclassical ballet choreographed in 1941 to J. S. Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins (BWV 1043), there is a memorable passage in which ten dancers hop on pointe while creating surprising visual accents against the music and against each other. The off-beat accents reflect the jazzy character of the ballet, and the pattern they articulate artfully relate to a metrically dissonant rhythmic motive in Bach’s score.