Prologues danse - "Apollo" et "Who cares ?" de Georges Balanchine

Les Prologues danse sont de courtes créations vidéo qui introduisent une soirée de spectacle sur La Sept (ancienne chaîne Arte).

Gershwin’s radiant melodies serve as the basis for syncopated group dances and balmy, romantic duets.

Balanchine had an early opportunity to work with George Gershwin: In  1937 Gershwin asked Balanchine to come to Hollywood to work with him on Goldwyn’s Follies(released 1938), which included a Romeo and Juliet  number with a mock duel between ballet-dancing Montagues and  tap-dancing Capulets. Thirty-three years later, Balanchine choreographed  Who Cares? to 16 songs Gershwin composed between 1924 and  1931. Balanchine used the songs not to evoke a particular era but as a  basis for a dynamic that is uniquely American and, more specifically,  evocative of New York City: Balanchine’s choreography brings out the  exuberance of city life.

Who Cares? is both the name of a ballet in the classical idiom by  George Balanchine and an old song George and Ira Gershwin wrote in 1931  for Of Thee I Sing. The dictionary says “classic” means  standard, leading, belonging to the highest rank or authority. Once it  applied mainly to masterpieces from Greco-Roman antiquity; now we have  boxing and horse-racing classics, classic cocktail-dresses, and classic  cocktails. Among classic American composers we number Stephen Foster,  John Philip Sousa, and George Gershwin (1898-1937). First heard 50 years  ago, the best of Gershwin songs maintain their classic freshness, like  an eternal martini – dry, frank, refreshing, tailor-made, with an  invisible kick from its slightest hint of citron. Nostalgia has not  syruped the songs’ sentiment nor robbed them of immediate piquancy. We  associate them with time past, but when well sung or played, or  preferably both at once, they not only revive but transcend their epoch.

The Gershwins’ beautiful manners and high style, their instant  melange of insouciance and shrewd innocence, their just estimation of  the imaginative elasticity of an elite audience that they had developed,  have left a body of words and music that lives unblurred by vulgar  rhetoric or machine-made sentiment. To combine an intensely personal  attitude with a flagrantly popular language is a feat that few popular  artists manage, and it is appropriate that Balanchine has used the songs  not as facile recapitulation of a lost epoch, but simply as songs or  melodies for classic, undeformed, traditional academic dances, which in  their equivalence of phrasing, dynamics, and emotions find their  brotherly parallel.

–Lincoln Kirstein 

Source: New York City Ballet