Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century

"This is a book about George Balanchine, the great choreographer. This book slightly snuck up on a few of us because ballet is not something I’m that interested in: I spent time taking our daughter to ballet classes for several years, but it’s not an area I’m totally familiar with. It’s a big book. It’s a biography of a man who almost walks with the 20th century, so you get all that history. Balanchine was of Georgian heritage and grew up in Tsarist Russia. Early on, he was selected to go into the Imperial Ballet School, so he’s on that track. Then, the Russian Revolution happens and everything falls into turmoil on all fronts. There’s a lot of hunger, violence, and chaos. Interestingly, the Communists decided that their approach to culture was not going to be totally avant garde and progressive. They assume a lot of the culture from the imperial period but give it a people’s interpretation. The ballet becomes what it became throughout the Soviet decades—a showcase. Within the Soviet system, a very elitist high art form was adopted. Balanchine parts company with that, as a young man, as do a lot of others. They come on a wandering journey via Berlin and Paris and London. So many of those Russian emigres— Nabokov , Diaghilev, Stravinsky—get out of Russia. Balanchine eventually winds up in America, where he meets well-connected benefactors and cultural managers. They feel that American ballet hadn’t yet achieved the same level of institutional high standing as Europe. They have the ambition to rectify that and are keen to use people like Balanchine and others who had come over to the US. Eventually, Balanchine sets up the New York City Ballet Company, which, in effect, becomes the country’s national ballet. It is an extraordinary story with lots of incidents. It covers what he did through the decades in the States. In his final years, a very moving period, he goes back to the Soviet Union as a Westerner. He’s still got family there, and we see how he negotiates that. The book works, I think, because it’s written by a ballet critic. Dance is a difficult thing to write about. Homans manages that while putting it within this extraordinary context. It’s a particular cultural history of the 20th century. Even though it’s quite long, it is written in a way that carries you with it."

"The perfect match of biographer and subject! A dancer who trained with Balanchine’s School of American Ballet in New York and is now dance critic for The New Yorker, Homans has written a biography of the man known as ‘the Shakespeare of Dance.’ In felicitous prose, Homans channels the dancer’s experience onto the page, from the body movements that can produce such beauty to the aching tendons and ligaments. Training is transformation, Homan writes, and working with Balanchine was a kind of metamorphosis tangled with pain. She evokes the dances so vividly that one can almost hear the music. “At the heart of biography is the quest to understand the interplay between individual and social forces” Homans captures Balanchine in a constant state of reinvention, tracing his life from Czarist Russia to Weimar Berlin , finally making his way to post-war New York where he revitalized the world of ballet by embracing modernish, founding New York City Ballet in 1948. Balanchine was genius whose personal history shape-shifted over the years. Homans grounds Mr. B in more than a hundred interviews, and draws from archives around the world. Homans captures Balanchine’s charisma and cultural importance, but Mr. B. is no hagiography. Homans grasps the knot of sex and power over women used in his work. He married four times, always to dancers. They were all the same kind of swan-necked, long-waisted, long-limbed women, and although Homans does not write this, his company often sounds more like a cult than art. And, of course, there is the matter of weight, which Homans dealt with directly, as did Balanchine. He posted a sign: ‘BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY—YOU MUST WEIGH.’ Indeed!"