Weaving Apollo

Abstract

This chapter, written by a former New York City Ballet dancer turned choreographer, critically examines the influence of George Balanchine’s Apollo on women’s authorship. Much has been written about the grip of patriarchal culture on ballet culture, as male leaders continue to dominate female muses and outmoded representations of gender persist. Balanchine famously granted his ballerinas interpretive range, while limiting their ability to choreograph. “Ballet is woman,” he declared, but women do not make the ballets. This chapter shifts the critical lens to the ways that a repertory, specifically an iconic ballet, can infiltrate a company’s consciousness—in this case, through a male god of classical Greek antiquity, reimagined through Igor Stravinsky’s score and Balanchine’s choreography, spanning nine decades of interpretation. Drawing on the project Incarnations, and a collaboration with Yvonne Rainer, the chapter argues for more complex choreographic strategies in contemporary work, as one way to disrupt and dismantle the inherited male creator/female muse paradigm embedded within neoclassical ballet.