Above all, a Balanchine ballet, the work itself, was more important than the individual dancer. The result was Mr. Balanchine's celebrated no-star policy.
''As soon as you start selling a person, that's commercial,'' he once explained. A deeper reason lay in his insistence on the purity of movement, uncolored by the idiosyncrasies of a star performer.
Yet none of this virtuosity - usually concealed rather than overt in a show-stopping number - was limited to the leading dancers. More than any other ballet choreographer, Mr. Balanchine made the ensemble the star, using the corps de ballet on the same level as the ballerina. The interplay between the two was constant.
To those who could not share Mr. Balanchine's formalist esthetic - that movement alone was interesting in itself - the Balanchine vision offered a very limited range of ballet. It was not for those who looked for the dance-drama of the 20th-century psychological ballet or for those who looked for spectacle.
In the same way, the choreographer for whom Stravinsky composed four ballets because he considered him a fellow musician would also feel free to turn to the marches of John Philip Sousa and to cowboy tunes for his ballets.
For many years, in fact, Mr. Balanchine favored a Western style of dress, appearing often in denim outfits, with a Texas string tie or a Zuni Indian bracelet. Nonetheless, he kept his Russian accent and his fondness for Russian Easter cake, which he made himself.
He could also mimic any television commercial. American popular culture was thoroughly familiar to him. He choreographed more than 19 Broadway shows and four Hollywood films. It was this experience as well as the Stravinsky collaboration that, in Mr. Kirstein's view, shaped the Balanchine style in the United States.
In later years, Mr. Balanchine would proudly refer to this non-Slavic ancestry. His mother, Maria Vasilyeva, a bank employee, was Russian. But his father, Meliton Balanchivadze, was a well-known Georgian composer who moved with his wife, daughter, Tamara, and younger son, Andrei - later a well-known Soviet composer - to Tiflis (now Tbilisi) in 1918 to be part of the short-lived Socialist Government of the independent Menshevik Georgian Republic. Andrei Balanchivadze, who still lives in Tbilisi, is Mr. Balanchine's sole survivor.
Shortly before he graduated in 1921 from the ballet school, the young student entered the Petrograd State Conservatory of Music, toying with the idea of becoming a pianist. Although he did not finish the conservatory, his three years of studies gave him a training in music that was singular among choreographers.
Mr. Balanchine also became involved in the staging of avant-garde theatrical productions that were part of the artistic ferment swept in by the Russian Revolution.
Together they became part of a nucleus of young dancers from the ballet school that Mr. Balanchine used to present his first pieces of choreography. ''I loved music and suddenly I wanted to move people to music, to arrange dances,'' he said in 1954.
Like other young artists, he was in revolt against the past. A chief influence at the time was Kasyan Goleizovsky, whose choreography revealed to Mr. Balanchine the use of the unadorned human body in a fluent plastique of movement.
The message that dance could be a self-sufficient art was impressed on him even more strongly through the choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov. Mr. Lopukhov invited Mr. Balanchine and his friends, including Alexandra Danilova, to perform his ''Dance Symphony.'' The ballet was given on May 7, 1923.
In 1923, Mr. Balanchine's unorthodox choreography, performed in clubs or institutions, found no favor inside the State Ballet Company. Only one duet, ''Enigma,'' to music by Arensky, was taken into the repertory, and the dancers in the official company were told to leave the Balanchine group in early 1924.
In 1923-24, Mr. Balanchine was named a balletmaster at Petrograd's more experimental Maly Theater. He also continued to dance in the State Academic Theater's ballet and opera productions.
Within a few weeks they had been hired by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Mr. Balanchine was taken on to dance and choreograph the ballets the famed impresario had promised to provide the opera company at Monte Carlo.
Impressed with his new find and bereft of a choreographer after the departure of Bronislava Nijinska, Diaghilev then appointed the 21-year-old Mr. Balanchine to be choreographer of the most famous ballet company in the world. As Diaghilev's last balletmaster, Mr. Balanchine choreographed 10 ballets as well as one in collaboration with Nijinska.
By the time Diaghilev died suddenly in August 1929, the 25-yearold choreographer had made an international name for himself. Yet, choreographically, he was still in search of a personal style. Typically, his last ballet for Diaghilev, the 1929 Prokofiev ''Prodigal Son,'' was a far remove from the plotless, streamlined neo-Classicism with which he is now identified.
With Diaghilev's death, the members of the Ballets Russes faced an uncertain future. There were also changes in Mr. Balanchine's personal life. His marriage to Miss Geva had broken up in 1927, and she had gone to the United States. She was replaced in Mr. Balanchine's affections by the ballerina Alexandra Danilova, but for such stateless Russian refugees, the paperwork involving divorce and marriage was out of the question.
The fact that Mr. Balanchine did eventually marry four times - each time to a dancer for whom he created ballets - became a part of ballet lore. After he came to the United States, he married Vera Zorina in 1938, and later the City Ballet's Maria Tallchief, and then Tanaquil LeClercq, from whom he was divorced in 1969.
In earlier years, Mr. Balanchine was quoted as saying it was his wives who had left him. Outwardly, his personality emitted the same lack of overt emotionalism that he preferred in ballet.
The years between 1929 and Mr. Balanchine's immigration to the United States in October 1933 were rootless ones, but there is every sign he relished the creative opportunities that came his way. In 1930, he created several ''ballets'' for Charles Cochrane's sophisticated musical revues in London. After serving as guest balletmaster in 1930-31 for the Royal Danish Ballet, he returned to London to stage dances for another English producer, Oswald Stoll.
London is where Mr. Balanchine would have liked to settle, but the British Government refused him a residence permit. The immediate future brightened when he was asked to become balletmaster of a new company organized by Rene Blum in Monte Carlo that became known as the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
The troupe folded, but not before the all-Balanchine repertory had convinced Mr. Kirstein that he would like to invite Mr. Balanchine to the United States to found a school and a company. Mr. Balanchine accepted, but asked that Vladimir Dimitriev be the school's administrator. Mr. Kirstein, who had not yet come into his inheritance, had persuaded a classmate, Edward Warburg, to finance the venture.
A. Everett Austin, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, a museum in Hartford, offered the institutional sponsorship for the school, but Mr. Balanchine and Mr. Dimitriev refused to work in Hartford. On Jan. 2, 1934, the School of American Ballet opened in Manhattan on East 59th Street at Madison Avenue.
The first Balanchine-Kirstein company was named the American Ballet in 1935. Its repertory included ''Serenade,'' the first Balanchine ballet choreographed in America and one that remained consistently in the City Ballet repertory.
Faced with the failure of his company, Mr. Balanchine spent the next eight years mostly choreographing for Broadway shows and films. Mr. Kirstein had, in 1936, founded a small touring company, Ballet Caravan, that concentrated on Americana and American folk themes.
In the meantime, Mr. Balanchine choreographed a series of Broadway shows including ''On Your Toes,'' ''Babes in Arms,'' ''I Married an Angel'' and ''The Boys From Syracuse.'' Between 1942 and 1944 he did choreography for the operettas ''The Merry Widow,'' ''Rosalinda'' and ''Song of Norway.'' In 1938, members of the American Ballet and Vera Zorina appeared in Mr. Balanchine's choreography for ''The Goldwyn Follies'' in Hollywood, where he worked on three other films through 1942.
Meanwhile, in 1946, Mr. Kirstein, back from Army service, had established a new organization, Ballet Society. For this small group, drawn from the School of American Ballet and which made its debut on Nov. 20, 1946, in the Central High School of Needle Trades, Mr. Balanchine created two of his finest ballets -