Having made his first dance in 1954, he has amassed a growing collection of 133 dances performed by his celebrated company of 16 dancers and the six-member Taylor 2. People throughout the world have enjoyed live modern dance performances due largely to the far-reaching tours that Taylor pioneered as a virtuoso dancer in the 1950s. A commanding performer despite his late start, he joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1955 for the first of seven seasons as a soloist while continuing to choreograph his own troupe. By 1954, he had assembled a small company of dancers and was making his own works. He was a swimmer and student of painting at Syracuse University in the late 1940s until he discovered dance, which he began studying at Juilliard. Taylor was born in 1930 and grew up in and around Washington, D.C. He may propel his dancers through space for the sheer beauty of it or use them to wordlessly illuminate war, spirituality, sexuality, morality, and mortality. As prolific as ever, he continues to offer cogent observations on lifeвЂ™s complexities while tackling some of societyвЂ™s thorniest issues. At an age when most artistsвЂ™ best work is behind them, Taylor continues to win acclaim for the vibrancy, relevance, and power of his recent dances as well as his classics. Paul Taylor is the last living member of the pantheon that created AmericaвЂ™s indigenous art of modern dance. Although at first his style seemed particularly suited to the energy and speed of American dancers, especially those he trained, his ballets are now performed by all the major classical ballet companies throughout the world. This had an inestimable influence on the growth of dance in America. Taking classicism as his base, he heightened, quickened, expanded, streamlined, and even inverted the fundamentals of the 400-year-old language of academic dance. Among his best-known dances for the stage is вЂњSlaughter on Tenth Avenue,вЂќ originally created for BroadwayвЂ™s On Your Toes (1936).The musical was later made into a movie.ДЄ major artistic figure of the twentieth century, Balanchine revolutionized the look of classical ballet. He also choreographed for films, operas, revues, and musicals. His final ballet, a new version of StravinskyвЂ™s Variations for Orchestra, was created in 1982. Balanchine served as its ballet master and principal choreographer from 1948 until his death in 1983.Д«alanchineвЂ™s more than 400 dance works include Serenade (1934), Concerto Barocco (1941), Le Palais de Cristal, later renamed Symphony in C (1947), Orpheus (1948), The Nutcracker (1954), Agon (1957), Symphony in Three Movements (1972), Stravinsky Violin Concerto (1972), Vienna Waltzes (1977), Ballo della Regina (1978), and Mozartiana (1981). Several ballet companies directed by the two were created and dissolved in the years that followed, while Balanchine found other outlets for his choreography.Eventually, with a performance on October 11, 1948, New York City Ballet was born. This was the School of American Ballet, founded in 1934, the first product of the Balanchine-Kirstein collaboration. At BalanchineвЂ™s behest, Kirstein was also prepared to support the formation of an American academy of ballet that would eventually rival the long-established schools of Europe. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-96), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet.

Oberlin academic calendar fall 2015