He was known with affectionate reverence as "Mr. B," and that imperious initial may as well have stood for "ballet" itself. Without George Balanchine, there would be no American ballet, only ballet in America. The self-proclaimed artistic descendent of the great Russian choreographer Marius Petipa, B

Bombast, High modernism -- ballet in america, Machinistic, Physical force, Pioneering

As a dancer, teacher, and choreographer of almost mythic stature, Martha Graham loomed over American dance. She created a technique that married energetic force to form; an entire new dance vocabulary resulted from her study of the dynamics of breath. Calling her dance creations "a graph of the heart

Biomorphic, Geometric, Moody, Mythic, Pioneering, Religious, Spare, Tense