Balanchine was born Georgiy Melitonovich Balanchivadze in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, son of Georgian opera singer and composer Meliton Balanchivadze, one of the founders of the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theatre and later the Minister of Culture of the Georgian Democratic Republic, which became independent in 1918 but was later forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Tamara's career, however, would be cut short by her death in unknown circumstances as she was trying to escape on a train from besieged Leningrad to Georgia.

[11]: 248 Based on his audition, during 1913 (at age nine), Balanchine relocated from rural Finland[clarification needed] to Saint Petersburg and was accepted into the Imperial Ballet School, principal school of the Imperial Ballet, where he was a student of Pavel Gerdt and Samuil Andrianov (Gerdt's son-in-law).

[13] Balanchine spent the World War I years at the Mariinsky Theater until it closed down in 1917 due to a government decree.

While still in his teens, Balanchine choreographed his first work, a pas de deux named La Nuit (1920, music by Anton Rubinstein), a piece which the school of directors did not approve of or like.

[15] Balanchine with his wife, Tamara Geva, and several other dancers (Alexandra Danilova, Nicholas Efimov) went to Germany, but all performances in Berlin were met coldly.

Geva wrote later, that in that time they had to dance 'in small dark places, in summer theaters and private ballrooms, in beer gardens and before mental patients'.

To earn money, Balanchine began to stage dances for Charles B. Cochran's revues and Sir Oswald Stoll's variety shows in London.

Among his new works for the company were Danses Concertantes, a pure dance piece to music by Stravinsky, and Night Shadow, revived under the title La Sonnambula.

In 1933, without consulting Blum, Col. de Basil dropped Balanchine after one year[21] – ostensibly because he thought that audiences preferred the works choreographed by Massine.

The company lasted only a couple of months during 1933, performing only in Paris and London, when the Great Depression made arts more difficult to fund.

Balanchine created several new works, including collaborations with composers Kurt Weill, Darius Milhaud, Henri Sauguet and designer Pavel Tchelitchew.

Balanchine insisted that his first project in the United States would be to establish a ballet school because he wanted to develop dancers who had strong technique along with his particular style.

Between his ballet activities in the 1930s and 1940s, Balanchine choreographed Broadway musicals written by such notables as Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Vernon Duke.

[23] On Your Toes featured two ballets: La Princesse Zenobia and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, in which a tap dancer falls in love with a dance-hall girl.

Balanchine created dances for five movies, all of which featured Vera Zorina, whom he met on the set of The Goldwyn Follies and who subsequently became his second wife.

From 1944 to 1946, during and after World War II, Balanchine served as resident choreographer for Blum & Massine's new iteration of Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo.

His other famous ballets created for New York companies include Firebird, Allegro Brilliante, Agon, The Seven Deadly Sins, and Episodes.

[29] Starting out his professional career with opera ballets, Balanchine did not take classicism as the a priori theory, but instead searched for his own style through the 1930s.

Balanchine's removal of characters, storytelling, and costumes bring ballet back into reality to redefine the beauty of dance in its purest form.

As the formalist David Michael Levin commented, "Balanchine has mastered the deepest logic of this intrinsic, expressive power of the human body".

[32] The displacement of hips instead of vertical alignment, angular arms and flexed wrists, and the non-traditional timing of movements are the several key elements in Balanchine's works that scholars identify as developed under the African influence.

Balanchine was still officially married to another dancer, Tamara Geva, and he told Miss Danilova that because his marriage papers had been left behind in Russia, he feared it might be difficult to arrange a legal separation.

"[33] He married and divorced three more times, all to women who were his dancers: Vera Zorina (1938–1946), Maria Tallchief (1946–1952), and Tanaquil LeClercq (1952–1969).

Biographer and intellectual historian Clive James has argued that Balanchine, despite his creative genius and brilliance as a ballet choreographer, had his darker side.

In his Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007), James writes that: the great choreographer ruled the New York City Ballet as a fiefdom, with the 'droit du seigneur' among his privileges.

When [ballerina Suzanne Farrell] fell in love with and married a young dancer, Balanchine dismissed her from the company, thereby injuring her career for a crucial decade.

George Balanchine Way is a segment of West 63rd Street (located between Columbus Avenue and Broadway) in New York City that was renamed in his honor in June 1990.

Playwright Richard Nelson wrote Nikolai and the Others, produced at the Mitzi Newhouse theater at Lincoln Center in 2013 with Michael Cerveris as Balanchine.