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.

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