Tango is a short ballet George Balanchine made for New York City Ballet to Stravinsky's 1940 piano piece of the same name, in the composer's own 1953 orchestral arrangement. It premiered on June 10, 1982, at the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center, as part of City Ballet's Stravinsky Centennial Celebration, a festival mounted to mark the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth.
What is danced
The source article gives no synopsis, cast breakdown, or description of the choreography itself — it records only the title, the music and its arranger, the company, and the premiere date and occasion. Nothing in the article describes what the dancers actually do: no mention of cast size, of pas de deux or ensemble structure, of pointe work versus character shoes, or of how the tango's dramatic couple-dance associations were treated or abstracted. Any account of the actual steps would have to come from a separate source (a programme note, a review of the choreography rather than its context, or a film record), none of which is present here.
Context
The premiere sat inside City Ballet's 1982 Stravinsky Centennial Celebration, a festival built around the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth and following on from the company's landmark 1972 Stravinsky Festival, which had already cemented the Balanchine–Stravinsky partnership as one of the central relationships in twentieth-century ballet. Tango used one of Stravinsky's shorter, lighter scores — a 1940 piano piece the composer himself later scored for orchestra — rather than one of the large symphonic works more typically associated with the Balanchine/Stravinsky ballets, which the article records without further comment on why this particular piece was chosen for the centennial programme.
Staging history
The article records only the single 1982 premiere at the New York State Theater and does not describe any subsequent staging, revival, or transfer to another company. It lists a contemporary review (Anna Kisselgoff, New York Times, June 11, 1982) and a later article (John J. O'Connor, New York Times, February 13, 1984), but neither is quoted or summarized in the source, so nothing about the work's reception or afterlife beyond its existence can be responsibly reported here.
How to watch it
The article's only concrete handle is the music itself: Stravinsky's 1940 Tango, orchestrated by the composer in 1953, which a viewer can listen for as a compact, dry, rhythmically pointed piece rather than a symphonic Stravinsky score. Beyond that, there is nothing in the record to tell a viewer what convention — narrative pas de deux, plotless ensemble, or something else — is actually at work on stage.
Credits
- composer: Igor Stravinsky