Martha Graham said that watching George Balanchine choreograph a ballet was like "watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance." Twenty years after his death, the ruthless, enigmatic founder of New York City Ballet still dominates the world of dance. He worked with both Serge Diaghilev and Sam Goldwyn. He made ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky and also to "The Stars and Stripes Forever." A Russian émigré who fell hopelessly in love with American culture, his four marriages and countless affairs (all of them with beautiful young ballerinas) became tabloid fodder. Though he turned ballet into a truly modern art, his plotless, seemingly abstract dances were as romantic as the genius who made them. "Put a man and a girl on the stage and there is already a story," Balanchine said. "A man and two girls, there's already a plot." New York drama and music critic Terry Teachout tells the greatest choreographer's story, and posits that his ballets will be even more significant in the future.