For many, George Balanchine's arrival in Connecticut in 1933 marks the beginning of the history of American ballet. Jessica Zeller's Shapes of American Ballet: Teachers and Training Before Balanchine demonstrates just how unofficial a designation that date is and provides an important corrective to histories of ballet in the United States that, implicitly or explicitly, begin with the founding of Balanchine's School of American Ballet in 1934. Arguing that the development of “American ballet” during the first part of the twentieth century “paralleled the larger national dialogue on the nature of Americanism during this period of vast cultural flux,” Zeller makes a compelling case for understanding ballet as an “immigrant” form that had to adapt to the social and economic structures of its new home and, in so doing, became “American” well in advance of Balanchine's influence (2). Using a wealth of archival sources, including dance manuals, newspaper and magazine articles, and interviews, Zeller focuses on pedagogy or, as she writes, “the unspoken, underexamined element of the oral tradition” that is the “unique working relationship of the dancer and pedagogue in the studio” (3). By taking stock of the various ballet teachers who lived, worked, trained, and choreographed in the United States prior to Balanchine's arrival, Zeller indeed succeeds at “offer[ing] a new telling of the history of American ballet” and “refute[ing] the widespread notion that the period between 1909 and 1934 was ‘largely barren ground’” (1).

Zeller divides Shapes of American Ballet into two parts, each consisting of three chapters: Part I sets up the theoretical and historical underpinnings of her text, while Part II takes on case studies of ballet pedagogues based in New York in the first part of the twentieth century. The bulk of Zeller's argument lies in these first three chapters, which approach the issue of ballet's Americanization through three lenses: first by considering ballet as a “migrant” form from Italy and Russia that had to discover its own “national identity in the States” in the face of general disinterest, or even distrust, among the populace; second by discussing the ways in which the variety of venues where ballet was performed contributed to American ballet's “hybridizing” with other dance forms; and third by focusing on the impact American capitalism had on a form that had, until its move to the United States, been intimately and inextricably dependent on state funding (5).

While Zeller is hardly the first to consider the impact of changing economies on the development of ballet, let alone dance in general (examples include Lynn Garafola's Diaghilev's Ballets Russes (Reference Garafola1989), Cynthia Novack's Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation in American Culture (Reference Novack1990), and Anthea Kraut's Choreographing Copyright (Reference Kraut2016), her argument that ballet's Americanization, both in terms of its aesthetics and pedagogy, was fundamentally tied to market economics is particularly compelling. As she writes, in the United States “the preferred entertainment of kings and tsars for centuries … was charged with its own survival on the American market like all other private enterprises, and it would have to prove itself both culturally relevant and financially worthy—to pull itself up by its bootstraps, as such—if it was to succeed” (60). Zeller makes clear that ballet's hybridization with other dance forms in the early twentieth century was driven as much by capitalist realities as it was by any specific aesthetic stance. She does so by highlighting the struggles of both American teachers and students: teachers found themselves needing to advertise themselves and their techniques in the face of a decentralized training environment, and students who lacked formal training often turned to teachers able to help them progress quickly and “amass a quick repertoire of steps that they could use to find work” on Broadway, vaudeville, and opera stages (71). Particularly interesting is her analysis of teacher-training, “normal courses,” mail-order dance classes, and dance manuals, which strongly deviated from the ways in which Euro-Russian ballet was taught and allowed anyone to train himself or herself in ballet through courses of home study, a tactic that allowed teachers to make money while also marketing themselves and their studios to a national audience (74–75). As Zeller writes, this kind of democratization of ballet pedagogy was “a result of market pressures on ballet's artist–entrepreneurs” who created a new kind of ballet training that both encompassed the “heterogeneity of the dance environment in New York City” and “attempted to produce finished dancers in a far more condensed time span than the decade-long training systems in Europe and Russia” (85).

In Part II, Zeller turns to the specificity of case studies, using the themes of national identity, heterogeneity and hybridization, and economics as lenses through which to view seven pedagogues. In chapter 4 she looks closely at the pedagogical practices of Malvina Cavallazzi and Luigi Albertieri, in chapter 5 at those of Stefano Mascagno and Mikhail Mordkin, and in chapter 6 at those of Varanine Vestoff, Sonia Serova, and Louis H. Caliph. These case studies propose that ballet teachers in the United States at the beginning of the century operated in three main modes: traditionalists like Cavallazzi and Albertieri, who aimed to retain the purity of their Euro-Russian traditions, nostalgic revisionists like Mascagno and Mordkin, who reluctantly adapted ballet to suit American tastes, and pragmatic revisionists like Vestoff, Serova, and Chalif, who “worked eagerly” to transform the “Euro-Russian tradition” into “American ballet” (6). For each of these teachers—some better known in ballet history than others due to the relative success of their pupils—Zeller provides a short biography and details the ways in which each immigrant teacher either did or did not adapt to the pressures put upon his or her art by the heterogeneity of American culture and by the need to survive in a market system.

In particular, Zeller's studies of Vestoff, Serova, and Chalif—teachers she refers to as pragmatic revisionists—provide a corrective to analyses of the archival materials left behind by those pedagogues who read their reworkings of ballet technique as a distortion of the form. Instead, Zeller provides a variety of fascinating insights into how these teachers shaped not only American ballet aesthetically, but also dance culture in the United States broadly. In one such, she points to Serova's dance manual entitled Baby Work, published around 1920, that, as Zeller suggests, may have inaugurated the American system of “pre-ballet” and “creative movement,” thus making a lasting impact on how thousands of American children are first introduced to dance (161–63). And in another example, she credits to Chalif the establishment of “the dance studio as part of American culture,” its role as “rite of passage for many, whether or not they have professional aspirations,” and certain dance terms, such as his way of organizing the five ballet arm positions and the creation of the term “tour-jeté” instead of “grand jeté en tournant” or “entrelacé” (178). She argues that while these innovations had by Chalif's death in 1948 resulted in “a reputation for weakening ballet training in America,” in fact his “progressive, open approach” allowed more students to participate in dance culture, thus allowing ballet to take root in America (178). Her analyses of these pragmatic revisionists highlight how their innovations set the stage for ballet's contemporary role in American culture.

Zeller's singular focus on New York is the one disappointment in an otherwise compelling and important text. Although she defends this choice by arguing that New York City became the hub of ballet culture in the United States because it was where many ballet pedagogues from Europe settled and founded important schools such as the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in 1909 and the School of American Ballet in 1934, one is still left with the sense that to truly reassess American ballet culture prior to Balanchine, one needs also to reconsider the narrative that New York was at its center. An example of teachers working before the mid-1930s outside the New York metropolis, such as Adolph Bolm in Chicago and later in San Francisco, or Ernest Belcher in Los Angeles, would have been a welcome addition to this otherwise strong work.

Ultimately, text makes an important contribution to the field by asserting not simply the idea that ballet existed in America prior to Balanchine, but rather that ballet was already shifting away from its Euro-Russian roots prior to 1933. She makes her case that the teachers and the training happening in the United States during that period were as central to the development of ballet culture in the United States as the later developments of Ballet Caravan's Americana or Balanchine's abstract neoclassicism and that these teachers’ innovations—the insistence that all forms of dance required ballet training as well as the invention of pre-ballet—made a major impact on both ballet and the broader dance culture in the United States. In the process so doing Zeller provides key context to other studies of the period and sheds light not so much on forgotten choreographers, but rather on the teachers—or the teachers of the teachers—of those dancers and choreographers who would go on to create the kinds of ballets we have come to read as distinctly American: Agnes de Mille, Robert Joffrey, Jerome Robbins, and—crucial for the development of ballet outside New York—Ruth Page, Catherine Littlefield, Barbara Weisberger, and Willam, Harold, and Lew Christensen (107–108). As Zeller writes, “Like immigrants to the United States, ballet had to become acculturated to America,” and these teachers were the ones who, through their own trials and innovations, helped ballet become an American form.