Balanchine's pop art. (News).

George Balanchine is remembered as one of the geniuses of the twentieth century, ranked with Picasso, Stravinsky, and Joyce. However, few realize that the choreographer who took classical ballet to new heights also had his hand in twenty Broadway shows, at least four Hollywood films, three French vaudeville and operetta productions, four British revues and variety shows, and an elephant ballet for the circus.

These diverse endeavors are the subject of a research study called Popular Balanchine, which was undertaken by the George Balanchine Foundation in January 2000. This month, the project culminates with the submission of its archive of findings to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where it will be available to dance and theater scholars who want to investigate this little-known side of Mr. B's oeuvre.

The project was initiated by the Balanchine Foundation's president, Paul Epstein, and Nancy Reynolds, its director of research. Reynolds realized that now was the time to rediscover and document these works (most of which are from the 1930s and '40s), while some of the participants were still alive.

The project was able to amass a sizeable collection of material, including photos, drawings, posters, scripts, musical scores, production notes, playbills, souvenir programs, magazine articles, original cast recordings, and recorded (and transcribed) interviews with participants. The materials were collected by a team of forty researchers, each responsible for one or more of the productions.

Researchers weren't able to reconstruct any of the dance numbers from the musicals but did succeed in uncovering evidence that Balanchine had been involved as an uncredited choreographer (probably for contractual reasons) in some additional shows, such as the 1939 Broadway production of Stars in Your Eyes.

Lynn Garafola, who researched On Your Toes (which premiered on Broadway in 1936, was restaged in London in 1937, and revived on Broadway in 1954 and 1982), argues that musical theater was the newly arrived Russian choreographer's "way of learning about America," via American vernacular idioms like tap. "A lot of the attack and speed that we associate with Balanchine's work, and the jazziness that you find in many works, are a residue of his encounter with tap in the 1930s," Garafola says.

Another researcher, Kate Mattingly Moran, who investigated the 1940 Broadway production Keep off the Grass (in which Jose Limon performed), agrees that Balanchine's later work reflects the showman-like style he found in musical theater.

One extraordinary story was that of the 1940 Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky, which was set in the American South and featured an all-black cast, including Katherine Dunham and dancers from her company. Balanchine collaborated with Dunham on the choreography and staged the production--a remarkable undertaking considering he had no first-hand experience of Southern African American culture.

Constance Valis Hill, the principal researcher for Cabin in the Sky, asked Dunham what seemed to draw Balanchine to African American music and dance. Dunham said, "It was the Russian thing ... the Russian dirges that had resonance in the Negro spirituals ... and being a Georgian, it was his feeling for the underdog, for neglected groups, as the Georgians had been in Russia. And as a Georgian Russian, of course, he felt the rhythms and the strangeness ... in the way I approached choreography."

Dunham's interview and many others are part of the archive that will reside at the New York Public Library after June 1.