Men have played and continue to play a huge role in the development, history, and style of dance performance. Researching George Balanchine, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse, and Savion Glover, I found that each of them contributed to the dance world in different ways.
             George Balanchine, a Russian-born American choreographer, was one of the foremost choreographers in the history of ballet, particularly in the neoclassical style. He was trained at the Imperial Ballet Academy and studied composition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in Russia. In 1933 he moved to Paris and organized his own group, "Les Ballets". At the invitation of American ballet patron Lincoln Kirstein, Balanchine then moved to from Paris to New York City and together they founded the School of American Ballet in 1934 and the American Ballet Company in 1935. While with that company, Balanchine created works for various opera and ballet companies and for musical comedies. After the American Ballet Company dissolved in 1938, Balanchine's work for The Boys from Syracuse (1938) and the famous ballet sequence "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" in On Your Toes (1936) established ballet as a permanent element of the musical. With Kirstein he co founded Ballet Society in 1946, which in 1948 became the New York City Ballet. Under Balanchine's direction, the company became one of the world's great performing groups, with a repertory consisting largely of his ballets.
             Balanchine is considered the foremost representative of neoclassicism in ballet. Through him, ballet in the United States has a direct connection with the Russian classical ballet tradition of celebrated 19th-century choreographer Marius Petipa. Although some of his ballets, such as The Nutcracker (1954; revised 1964) and the powerful Don Quixote (1965), have a story line, Balanchine is best known for his plotless ballets, such as The Four Temperaments (1946) and Jewels (1967), which explore pattern and the movement of the ...