Cultural Exchange: Immigrants in the Performing Arts and 20th-Century America

FAIN: FB-53020-07

Joseph I. Horowitz
Brevard Music Center, Inc. (Brevard, NC 28712-0312)

My book-in-progress explores the fate and influence of immigrants in the performing arts who arrived in the US between the two world wars. With its Germanic beginnings, American classical music remained an aloof and prestigious exercise in colonization. Early Hollywood, also flooded by influential Germans, embodied a New World variant of cultural exchange, dizzily mixing America and Europe, art and entertainment. George Balanchine Americanized classical ballet: a New World/Old World dialectic exquisitely balanced and controlled. Theater, finally, illustrates a Russian-American transaction delayed by performer-driven commecial theater endemic to Broadway.