American Ballet Theatre (ABT) is a classical ballet company based in New York City. It has an annual eight-week season at the Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center) in the spring and a shorter season at the David H. Koch Theater in the fall; the company tours around the world the rest of the year. ABT was founded in 1937 by Lucia Chase and Mikhail Mordkin and is recognized as one of the world's leading classical ballet companies. ABT is also the parent company of the American Ballet Theatre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and was recognized as "America's National Ballet Company" in 2006 by the United States Congress.
Mikhail Mordkin, a former dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet, left Russia after the October Revolution and settled in the United States in 1924. He staged the country's first production of Swan Lake in 1924, then later formed the "Mordkin Ballet" in 1937 with students from his New York school, with Lucia Chase, his student, as one of his prima ballerinas. By 1939, former Hollywood agent, Richard Pleasant, came to New York to manage the company. By the summer of 1939, Pleasant and Chase developed big ideas to turn the company into a full-fledged ballet company, and to base it on "a gallery of dance rather than the vision of a single choreographer" and a "living museum of dance" with Russian, American and British "wings", and units for black and Hispanic dances. The pair renamed the company "Ballet Theatre" and Mordkin later departed, finding himself solely in the background.
There is great variety in dance in the United States of America. It is the home of the hip hop dance and its derivative Rock and Roll, and modern square dance (associated with the United States of America due to its historic development in that country—nineteen U.S. states have designated it as their official state dance) and one of the major centers for modern dance . There is a variety of social dance and concert or performance dance forms with also a range of traditions of Native American dances.
The reality shows and competitions So You Think You Can Dance,Americas Best Dance Crew, and Dancing with the Stars have broadened the audience for dance.
African American dances are those vernacular dances which have developed within African American communities in everyday spaces, rather than in dance studios, schools or companies. African American vernacular dances are usually centered on social dance practice, though performance dance and concert dance often supply complementary aspects to social dancing.
The American Ballet was the first professional ballet company George Balanchine created in the United States. The company was founded with the help of Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg, managed by Alexander Merovitch and populated by students of Kirstein and Balanchine's School of American Ballet. Having failed to mount a tour, American Ballet began performing at the "Old Met." After being allowed to stage only two dance performances (Orfeo and Eurydice in 1936 and an evening of dances choreographed to the music of Igor Stravinsky in 1937), Balanchine moved the company to Hollywood in 1938. The company was restarted as the American Ballet Caravan and toured North and South America, although it too folded after several years.