On Beauty, Balanchine, and Farrell: Platonic Modernism on the New York Dance Stage

Abstract: This paper examines how Plato’s theories of beauty in The Symposium were adapted into a mid-century aesthetic for American ballet by George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell. Their creative methods resulted in a literal realization of ideal and absolute Platonic beauty. Heeding Diotima’s teachings to Socrates on beauty, eroticism, and procreation, Balanchine and Farrell bring the aesthetic relationship between the material body and dematerialized beauty to life in the form of a new “corporeal minimalism”—female beauty in its most absolute state achieved through the dancing body itself.