IB ANDERSEN COACHES EXCERPTS FROM MOZARTIANA FOR THE GEORGE BALANCHINE FOUNDATION VIDEO ARCHIVES
New York City: On March 17, 2025, in the New York City Ballet studios at Lincoln Center, former New York City Ballet principal Ib Andersen coached excerpts from Mozartiana, including the male solos, the section known as "theme and variations," and the finale. He worked with NYCB principal Mira Nadon and soloist Jules Mabie. Elaine Chelton, NYCB Solo Pianist, accompanied the session.
Balanchine must have had a special fondness for this music as a score for dance, since he choreographed no fewer than four treatments to it, beginning in 1933 for the short-lived Les Ballets 1933. He set this (or perhaps a variant of it) the following year for the American Ballet. Another of his iterations was premiered by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo in 1945, remaining in the repertory of that company for several years. Balanchine's final treatment of the score premiered June 4, 1981, as one of opening works in the NYCB Tschaikovsky Festival.
It may be noted that Balanchine's earliest participants in the choreography have confirmed that in the beginning he constantly changed the steps as he experimented, so the details of the original choreography will never be known for sure. Clips of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo performances can be accessed on the internet.
Paul Boos, Director of the Video Archives, oversaw the filming with Founding Director Nancy Reynolds, which concluded with Andersen being interviewed by writer Elizabeth Kendall.
The GBF Video Archives document the insights of dancers, often principals from original casts or those who worked closely with Balanchine. The Archives mission is to preserve this knowledge and pass it on to today's dancers, scholars, and audiences. The Archives are available world-wide through public and university libraries, and digitally through the George Balanchine Foundation website for those working in the dance field and using these resources in their work. In addition, the interview components can be accessed on the Balanchine Foundation's YouTube channel.
IB ANDERSEN, born in Copenhagen and accepted into the Royal Danish Ballet School at 7, he studied with Kirsten Ralov, Hans Brenaa, Flemming Ryberg, and Vera Volkova. In 1972, at the age 18, he was accepted by the Royal Danish Ballet as an apprentice and was promoted to principal dancer at the age of 20, which made him the youngest principal in the company's history. At the Royal Danish Ballet, Andersen appeared in leading roles in ballets of August Bournonville, such as Napoli, Flower Festival in Genzano, Far from Denmark, The Kermesse in Bruges, and A Folk Tale, as well as in classic ballets such as The Nutcracker, Coppélia and Giselle. In 1980, George Balanchine invited him to join the NYCB. Roles that were created for him by Balanchine included Ballade (1980), Robert Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze (1980), and Mozartiana (1981). Altogether, Andersen appeared in some sixty ballets during his ten years with the company. In 2000, after a brief period as ballet master for Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, Andersen was appointed artistic director of Ballet Arizona, where he, for more than 24 years, oversaw a repertory of classical and contemporary ballets and also staged many works by Balanchine. He also created a number of original works for the company. In 2024 he stepped down from the role as artistic director and was appointed Artistic Director Emeritus for the company. He is currently a guest teacher and coach.
MIRA NADON, a NYCB principal, began her ballet training in Montclair, California and in 2017, Ms. Nadon became an apprentice with NYCB, rising through the ranks to corps de ballet in 2018, soloist in 2022, and principal in 2023. She has been featured in Balanchine’s Apollo, Errante, Monumentum/Movements, Scotch Symphony, Raymonda Variations andLiebeslieder Walzer as well as ballets by Robbins, Martins and Ratmansky. For the Interpreters Archive video series, she has been coached by Allegra Kent in Symphony in C, Allegra Kent and Bart Cook in Agon pas de deux, Colleen Neary in Kammermusik No. 2, and Kay Mazzo in Swan Lake.
JULES MABIE, a soloist with NYCB, was born in West Palm Beach, Florida and began his dance training there. Mr. Mabie attended summer programs at SAB, and in 2016 he entered the school as a full-time student. In November 2018, Mr. Mabie became an apprentice with NYCB. As an apprentice, he performed a featured role in George Balanchine’s Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. In May 2019, he joined the Company as a member of the corps de ballet and has since been featured in George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker®, Agon, and Symphony in Three Movements.
ELIZABETH KENDALL is a dance and culture critic and an associate professor of Writing/Literary Studies at New York's New School (Eugene Lang College and Liberal Studies graduate faculties). Her book Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer was published in July, 2013, by Oxford U. Press (paperback summer 2015). She has also written Where She Danced, (Knopf & U. of California Press); The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930's (Knopf & Cooper Square Press), two memoirs, American Daughter (Random House, 2000) and Autobiography of a Wardrobe (Pantheon and Anchor/Doubleday, 2006), and magazine, newspaper and journal articles. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Foundations, NYPL's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Likhachev Foundation of Russia, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography. She is at work on an experimental biography of Balanchine. For the GBF video Archives she has interviewed the coaches for Stravinsky Violin Concerto, Tarantella, excerpts from Vienna Waltzes and Orpheus, and the donkey pas de deux from A Midsummer Night's Dream.
NANCY REYNOLDS is the founding director of the George Balanchine Video Archives. She is a former dancer with New York City Ballet and has been Director of Research for The George Balanchine Foundation since 1994, when she conceived the Video Archives program. Among her books are Repertory in Review: Forty Years of the New York City Ballet; No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (with Malcolm McCormick); and Remembering Lincoln. In 2013 she received a “Bessie” award for “outstanding service to the field of dance.”
PAUL BOOS, Director of the Video Archives since 2021, is a former dancer with NYCB and répétiteur for the George Balanchine Trust. His work for the Trust has been presented at several theaters, including the Maryinsky, Bolshoi, Paris Opera, La Scala, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Boston Ballet. He is the director of Rye Ballet Conservatory’s pre-pro division as well as a guest teacher abroad and locally.
The George Balanchine Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation established in 1983 with the goal of creating programs that educate the public and further Balanchine’s work and aesthetic. Among the GBF’s major initiatives are the Video Archives, in which dancers who worked closely with Balanchine teach and coach their roles with the dancers of today (Interpreters Archive) or recreate sections of ballets that are rarely performed or in danger of disappearing (Archive of Lost Choreography). Legendary dancers who have taken part in this project include Alicia Alonso, Jacques d’Amboise, Suzanne Farrell, Frederic Franklin, Melissa Hayden, Allegra Kent, Alicia Markova, Patricia McBride, Maria Tallchief, Violette Verdy, Patricia Wilde, Edward Villella, and others, working with dancers from such companies as New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, and San Francisco, Boston, Pacific Northwest and Suzanne Farrell ballets.
In 2007 the Foundation announced a major initiative, the online publication of the Balanchine Catalogue, a fully searchable database giving first-performance details of all known dances created by Balanchine and supplemented by lists of companies staging his ballets, a bibliography, a videography, reference resources, a database of roles Balanchine performed, and related information. The project was made possible by a leadership grant from The Jerome Robbins Foundation. An expanded and updated version, enhanced by visuals, was introduced in June 2022 (www.balanchine.org).
The George Balanchine Foundation expresses its profound gratitude to the following donors: Agnes Gund, Barbara D. Horgan, The New York State Council on the Arts, the Pettit Foundation, Nancy R. Reynolds and The Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and to Robert Brenner, Leslie Tonner Curtis, Russell Vaille Lee, The National Endowment for the Arts, Meryl Rosofsky and Stuart H. Coleman, The Evelyn Sharp Foundation, Denise Littlefield Sobel, Resa and Heiner Sussner, and I. Peter Wolff.
