New York City Ballet Pays Tribute to Maria Tallchief in Her Centennial Year

In 1946, Tallchief and Balanchine married: It would be the most wonderful thing, she remembered him saying in her 1997 memoir, and they could work together. The Russia-born Balanchine was enchanted by her Native American heritage, feeling it brought him closer to being American himself. When they visited her grandmother in Oklahoma, Tallchief wrote in her memoir, he was given a turquoise bracelet and put it right on his wrist. (He wore it nearly every day for over 30 years.) “When Grandma saw how happy it made him, she said she’d bead him a belt,” Tallchief wrote.

At the end of her Ballet Russe contract, Tallchief joined Balanchine and his new company as its leading dancer. Their marriage ended in an annulment filed in 1951, and signed on the day rehearsals began for that romantic “Scotch Symphony” pas de deux a year later. But Balanchine continued to create commanding roles for her like the Sugarplum Fairy in “The Nutcracker” and the lead in “Allegro Brillante.”

When she was married to Balanchine, she felt confined by how much her personal and professional lives were conjoined. “But now I was beginning to realize that there was another personage with whom my life as a woman was bound up,” she wrote in her memoir. “And that figure was Maria Tallchief, prima ballerina.”

Heléne Alexopoulos, a former New York City Ballet principal who was coached by Tallchief, said that her fame arose in an era when she was not the obvious prima ballerina. “She was so clearly American,” Alexopoulous said, at a time when the best dancers came from Europe. “She broke that ceiling.”

But that depiction of American-ness, especially in the media, often included a problematic portrayal of her Native American heritage. Time magazine praised her “gusto with flawless technique,” before noting that “offstage, she is as American as wampum and apple pie.”

Paschen, a poet, writes about the complexities of her mother’s life as an artist and Native American woman. From “Heritage IX,” in “Blood Wolf Moon” (2025), Paschen writes of the headlines in ’47: “‘Peau Rouge Danse a l’Opera.’/Peau Rouge, Red Skin/a phrase she learned/to ignore.”