The ballerina Maria Tallchief was having dinner with her husband, the choreographer George Balanchine, at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan when the impresario Sol Hurok approached their table. “Don’t you think it’s time to have your wife dance ‘Firebird’?” Hurok, who owned the Chagall sets and costumes for the ballet, asked Balanchine as he invited himself to a seat.
“My reaction was pure terror,” Tallchief recalled of that dinner in the 1940s in her memoir. So many had danced “The Firebird” before her. Tamara Karsavina, the Russian ballerina who originated the role in 1910, was so sublime in it that it helped make her, and the ballet, famous. Tallchief wouldn’t even be the first in America: The British dancer Alicia Markova had performed it beautifully in 1945. “Could I live up?” Tallchief asked herself.
Balanchine set to work reviving the ballet, and Tallchief rehearsed until his vision was reflected in her every movement. When his “Firebird” premiered in 1949 at New York City Ballet, there was a collective gasp as Tallchief leaped into the arms of Francisco Moncion’s Prince Ivan, plunging into a supernatural backbend, the tips of her fingers grazing the floor, her head tilting to catch the light.
Tallchief, a Native American ballerina of the Osage Nation, had redefined the role.
Her centennial is this year — she died in 2013, at 88 — and she remains widely regarded as America’s first prima ballerina and one of the most renowned Native American dancers. Her achievements have been celebrated with awards like the National Medal for the Arts (in 1999) and more unusual honors, too: There is a Maria Tallchief quarter, released in 2023, and even a Maria Tallchief Barbie. But her legacy rests on what she brought to the art form in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s — a series of revelations about what ballet could be and what a ballerina could look like.
Ballet in the 1930s and ’40s was still regarded as a European art. Touring companies took ballet across the United States with mostly European traditions and repertory. While company ranks were filled with dancers of different nationalities, including American, the stars were mainly Russian — even if just by stage name. (Markova was born Lilian Alicia Marks.) Audiences thought they wanted to see Russian ballerinas, until there was Tallchief.
She made an impression from the start. The New York Times wrote of the 18-year-old Tallchief: “She is well off the beaten track in ballerina types, but she is a ballerina as surely as this is Sunday.” The ballerina type was being transformed, and so was American ballet.
In February, New York City Ballet celebrates Tallchief’s centennial with a program featuring some of her most celebrated roles: “Firebird,” “Sylvia: Pas de Deux” and “Scotch Symphony,” which includes a pas de deux that Tallchief considered the most romantic Balanchine created for her.
“I feel like I know her a little bit through her ballets,” said Tiler Peck, the New York City Ballet principal who has danced many of Tallchief’s parts and who will make her debut in “Sylvia: Pas de Deux,” a short work bursting with classical technique, on the Tallchief program.
“There must have been a lot of trust in her as a ballerina and in her technical chops because it’s still hard today,” Peck said in an interview. “But more than the technique was that when she was onstage she demanded your attention. You could tell that this is a real, true ballerina.”
SHE WAS BORN Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief in Fairfax, Okla., where the Tall Chiefs were a prominent Osage family. Her great-grandfather Chief Peter Bigheart was involved with the Osage Allotment Act that led to the sharing of mineral rights and income from the oil found beneath the tribe’s land.
Her grandmother Eliza Bigheart Tall Chief, a strong influence on Maria, selected her Osage name, Princess Wa-Xthe-Thon-ba (Two Standards), which appears prominently on the quarter. Elise Paschen, Tallchief’s daughter, said that when her mother was young, “Eliza took her under her wing and really taught her the ways of the Osage.”
Tallchief’s mother, of Scottish Irish descent, enrolled Maria in ballet lessons as a young girl, along with her sister Marjorie, who would also go on to an important ballet career. In 1933 the family moved to Los Angeles, where Tallchief’s ballet training became more serious. (It was there that Tall Chief became Tallchief after students taunted her because of her Native American name; a few years later Betty Marie became Maria.) She studied with the great Bronislava Nijinska before joining the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo at 17 for its Canadian tour.
When Balanchine began choreographing for that company in the mid-1940s, he saw Tallchief’s potential and guided her through exercises and choreography that pushed her body and technique to new levels. She was there when the time was finally right for Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein to start a company, Ballet Society, which would become New York City Ballet.
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.”
Tallchief felt the pressures of representation, as an American ballerina among Europeans and, in her own country, as a Native American. As her Osage name suggests, Paschen said, she was “a woman who straddled both worlds. This cosmopolitan, balletic world, and her own heritage of being an Osage woman in Oklahoma.”
She continued to be in demand as a dancer, expanding her audience well beyond the theater. In 1954 she appeared on the cover of Newsweek (“The Ballet’s Tallchief: Native Dancer”), a glittering tiara atop her dark hair, her gaze toward the sky.
She was also quick to recognize the importance of bringing ballet directly into homes via television. Her fame coincided with the moment when TV was replacing the radio, and people could tune into major networks to see her dance. Suzanne Farrell, a later Balanchine muse, recalled at Tallchief’s 2013 memorial how as a young girl she would scour the TV Guide for Tallchief’s appearances.
She appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” in 1956 performing “The Nutcracker” pas de deux and was a guest many times on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” from 1959 to 1966, dancing a vast range of repertory.
Larry Kaplan, who worked with Tallchief for years on her memoir, knew her as a star when he was in high school in the ’50s. “I didn’t know anything about ballet,” he said. “But I knew that she was a famous ballerina and she stood for something.”
In her retirement she remained dedicated to Balanchine’s works and how they were interpreted. In a coaching session from the George Balanchine Foundation’s video archives, filmed in 1995, Tallchief meticulously leads Alexopoulos through the berceuse in “Firebird,” where a single golden light illuminates the ballerina. “The spotlight is very strong,” Tallchief explains. “So, I always tried to avoid looking where it would hit me in the eyes.”
A technical note, and maybe more — a testament to how she approached her art and career, clear-eyed and with determination.
“She was the grand master,” Alexopoulos said, remembering Tallchief’s attention to the finest detail. And she was a direct line to Balanchine’s masterpieces, at a moment in time when he was re-envisioning classical ballet. “He was creating a whole new way of being and there she was, giving it her all and being his clay.”
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