American Ballet Theatre

American Ballet Theatre, acclaimed American ballet company, based at the Metropolitan Opera House in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. The organization, originally named Ballet Theatre, was founded in 1940 by dancers Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant (Pleasant resigned in 1941). The company originally incorporated dancers from the Mordkin Ballet, which was founded in 1937 by the Russian dancer and choreographer Mikhail Mordkin, who also served as its director.

Ballet Theatre held its first performance in January 1940 and soon received praise for the quality of its performances. The company, which was based at the Metropolitan Opera House, toured the United States annually as well as making international tours. In 1945 designer Oliver Smith joined Chase as a co-director of the organization, and together they led the company for 35 years. In 1957 the company was renamed American Ballet Theatre, and in 1971 it became the official ballet company of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., where it remained for six years before returning to the Metropolitan Opera House in 1977. In 1980 the celebrated Russian-American dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov assumed artistic direction of American Ballet Theatre, refining the company’s classical repertory during his tenure. After Baryshnikov left the company in 1989, Smith and the dance administrator Jane Hermann assumed leadership until 1992, when a former principal dancer of the company, Kevin McKenzie, assumed the position of artistic director.

Since its inception, American Ballet Theatre has aimed to develop a repertoire of the best ballets from the past in addition to new works by talented guest choreographers. Notable examples of choreography created for American Ballet Theatre include Fancy Free (1944), by Jerome Robbins; The Leaves Are Fading (1975), by Anthony Tudor; Push Comes to Shove (1976), by Twyla Tharp; and Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes (1988), by Mark Morris. In 1974 dancer Natalia Makarova masterfully restaged Act II of La Bayadère, a classic ballet originated by the great 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa. Other choreographers who produced works for the company include Mordkin, Michel Fokine, Agnes de Mille, George Balanchine, Michael Kidd, Glen Tetley, Eliot Feld, Baryshnikov, and such modern dance choreographers as Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham. The company’s repertoire also contains full-length ballets of the 19th century, including Petipa’s Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle, as well as 20th-century masterpieces such as Fokine’s Les Sylphides (1909), Balanchine’s Apollo (1928), de Mille’s Rodeo (1942), and Romeo and Juliet (1985) by Kenneth MacMillan. The company has had many prominent principal dancers, including Alicia Markova, Alicia Alonso, Nora Kaye, Rosella Hightower, Makarova, Cynthia Gregory, Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Harvey, Anton Dolin, Hugh Laing, André Eglevsky, Igor Youskevitch, John Kriza, Erik Bruhn, Baryshnikov, Fernando Bujones, and Kevin McKenzie. Most recent principals have included Nina Ananiashvili, Julio Bocca, Jose Manuel Carreño, Alessandra Ferri, Paloma Herrera, Susan Jaffe, and Julie Kent.

Despite financial difficulties in the 1990s, the company continued to stage new works, both premieres, such as Twyla Tharp's Known by Heart (1998), and classic, full-length ballets (for example, MacMillan's Anastasia in 1999).