Dancing With Balanchine
As soon as Christensen began his training, he received special attention from George Balanchine, who recognized his talent. Among Balanchine’s first lead male dancers, Christensen danced principal roles, receiving much praise for his lead roles in Orpheus and Eurydice and Apollon Musagete. Christensen, the first American to dance Apollo, set a new standard for that role, and was thereafter considered to be America's first home grown significant male dancer.
At the onset of World War II, Lew Christensen was drafted into the United States Army. On return to New York in 1946 he joined Balanchine's and Kirstein's latest project, Ballet Society – later to be known as the New York City Ballet – where he became a ballet master. Although considered by many to be the logical heir to Balanchine's company, Christensen was instead enticed to join his brothers at the San Francisco Ballet in 1948.
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“Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self- collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)