This is George Balanchine's one-act treatment of Swan Lake, made for New York City Ballet and set to Tchaikovsky's score. It premiered on 20 November 1951 at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York, with Maria Tallchief and André Eglevsky heading the original cast alongside Patricia Wilde, Frank Hobi and Edward Bigelow.
What is danced
The source article gives only the premiere circumstances and the original cast; it contains no synopsis, scene breakdown, or description of steps, so nothing about the actual choreography can be drawn from it directly. What can be said with confidence is limited to the frame: a one-act ballet to Tchaikovsky's music, danced by a City Ballet-trained cast led by a ballerina (Tallchief) and a danseur (Eglevsky) in the central roles, with three further named dancers rounding out the cast — a company of five credited names suggests soloist and small-ensemble roles alongside any corps not listed here.
Context
The article situates the premiere at New York City Ballet in November 1951, only a few years after Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein founded the company (1948) and moved it into the City Center. That is the extent of context the article supplies; it makes no claim about how this version relates to the nineteenth-century Petipa–Ivanov Swan Lake or to Balanchine's broader project of reworking Imperial repertory in a compressed, plotline-lean American idiom.
How to watch it
The article does not describe the staging, so no performance-specific viewing notes can be given from it. A viewer should still expect to see this identified in programmes as a one-act (rather than full-length, four-act) Swan Lake, distinguishing it immediately from the standard Petipa/Ivanov structure.