Balanchine boogies on Broadway.

Not an opera house, but Broadway was where Americans first saw George Balanchine's choreography--and his dances arrived in New York before he did. The commercial stage and Hollywood film, in fact, were principal venues for Mr. B's work during the first two decades of his life in the United States. This important aspect of his oeuvre has recently been documented by the three-year Popular Balanchine Project, sponsored by the George Balanchine Foundation and directed by Claude Conyers.

"While we began with the hope of retrieving choreography," Conyers observed, "the extraordinary collection of oral histories, photographs, and various original documents--like programs and personal memorabilia--is the most valuable addition to our knowledge of Balanchine."

Between 1927 and 1954, Mr. B made dances for three commercial Paris productions, five London revues, more than twenty Broadway musicals, four Hollywood films, and a circus number, along with a London movie in which he appears. More than 100 original participants in these shows were contacted and all gave first-hand accounts of rehearsals and performances. The transcribed interviews are part of the Popular Balanchine Collection, available to the public in the New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division at Lincoln Center.

MUSIC, ESSENTIAL to Balanchine choreography, was amassed, and some was recorded for the first time. A dancer's diary, provides vivid images of Mr. B's contributions to Ziegfeld Follies of 1936. New material gives detail about collaborations with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart: On Your Toes, Babes in Arms, I Married an Angel, and The Boys from Syracuse. Balanchine's warm sense of humor surfaces in rehearsal photographs from Cabin in the Sky. Publicity stills from the 1930s show tap dancing chorus cuties who were destined for ballet stages: Jerome Robbins, Alicia Alonso, and Nora Kaye, among others.

For Conyers, the biggest surprise came with the film Louisiana Purchase, which does not credit Balanchine. Three individuals confirmed that the movie's Mardi Gras Pas de Deux is Mr. B's duet from the 1940 Broadway production, which he choreographed with Carl Randall.

Each Popular Balanchine production has an individual dossier--one or several acid-free boxes--that contains extensive new resources for scholars and aficionados. Dance Division professionals estimate the size of the Popular Balanchine Collection at fifty-seven archival boxes, reaching fourteen feet high if stacked vertically. Consistently, researchers were told about Mr. B's sweet temper, endless energy, and speedy compositional habits. The Popular Balanchine material further extends awareness of his astonishing creative range. Jack Lawrence, composer with Don Walker of Courtin' Time, affirmed, "George was never slumped."

Viewed as a whole, this material demonstrates interesting points. Balanchine earned most of his salary on commercial stages during the 1930s and 1940s. He kept a group of dancers together, providing polish and paychecks to classical artists at a time when New York ballet opportunities were scarce. While he was the first to place pure classicism on the Great White Way, he also interspersed these numbers with jitterbug, tap, jazz, and ethnic forms. Mr. B used Broadway and Hollywood to place ballet in front of a huge popular audience, demystifying the art and achieving a homegrown, American image for his dances.

Camille Hardy is a dance critic and historian. As either principal researcher or researcher-at-large, she worked on sixteen of the Popular Balanchine productions.