Dancing Scores: Concerto Barocco by George Balanchine

During the 20th century, experiments in dance without music proliferated, as did manifestos for the autonomy of the art of choreography with respect to sound accompaniment. Thus, it was against this trend that George Balanchine, in 1941, composed Concerto Barocco on the notes of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D minor for two violins, BWV 1043. In this work the music is not only a source of inspiration, but the backbone of the kinetic dynamics. The dancers’ bodies are conceived as musical instruments and, moreover, their movement is constructed in order to make the orchestral score visible. The result is a very high union of dance and music, where the language of academic ballet at the highest level of specialization takes the architectural perfection of Bach’s composition as its regulative ideal. The bodies on stage, so rarefied, compose a kind of utopian cosmos made of order and proportion, absolute poetry of harmony and purity.