I came across this Martha Swope photograph from 1963. George Balanchine is working with one of his relatively early muses, Diana Adams, while Jacques d'Amboise gravely observes the mirror-image of what he will be expected to do.
This, by the way, was the standard ballerina figure up through the 1960s. But from the Seventies onwards (and in no small part through Balanchine's influence) the standard ballerina became at least 20 pounds thinner. I have noticed in the recent wave of fresh adulation over Balanchine that nobody has mentioned his once-famous words to all his women dancers: "Don't eat."
Balanchine in Venice at age 22 when he was dancing with the Ballet Russes under Diaghilev, who also commissioned Balanchine's first choreography.
According to Vera Zorina (married to Balanchine from 1938 to 1946): "He admired physical beauty in an abstract form the way one might admire a painting by Seurat in terms of pointillism. He would discuss the particular tilt of the neck, those slender, fragile-looking stems actually having the strength of steel, as the "Maryinsky look" – after the famous school of ballet in St. Petersburg. This look, together with the upturned wrist like a fly-away bird, marked the dancer as an unmistakable Balanchine ballerina."