More than two decades after the death of George Balanchine, the choreographer's legacy is strangely unclear. In part this is because ballet has shallow roots in American culture. When Balanchine arrived in the United States in 1933, American ballet was little more than a vaudeville act. During the next 50 years, he raised American ballet to an internationally recognized art, producing an impressive body of great ballets and laying a foundation for generations to come—or so it was thought at the time of his death. But dance has no written tradition and disappears easily from collective memory: unless Balanchine's dances are alive and interesting now, we are likely to forget why they ever seemed so important.