Overview

George Balanchine did for dance what Picasso did for painting: he changed the art and the way we see the human form. In this magisterial cultural history, Jennifer Homans follows Balanchine from his childhood in Tsarist St Petersburg, through the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, and the cultural Cold War, to New York, where he co-founded and ran the New York City Ballet. His influences were myriad: he considered himself Georgian, yet did not visit his ancestral homeland until his fifties; he was deeply impressed by the grandeur and beauty of the Orthodox Church, but equally absorbed by the new rhythms coming out of Harlem in the 1930s. He was part of the Russian avant-garde and excited by surrealism and other artistic movements, collaborating broadly, with figures like Matisse, Diaghilev and Stravinsky. Above all, he was inspired by the young dancers he worked with, sculpting their bodies even as they reshaped his imagination, often to the point of romantic infatuation. Mr B. gathered around him successive generations of people who believed in his artistic vision as fervently as he did, and both the passions that animated him and the difficulties of his life - personal losses, bouts of ill health, and spiritual crises - resonate in his dances, which speak poignantly of love, loss and mortality. With unprecedented access to his papers and those who knew him, Homans tells a story of love and exile; of colossal talent and the boundless energy it took to reimagine dance. This is an epic portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.

Full Product Details

9781847087751

Table of Contents

Reviews

With unique expertise in dance and what it means to dance, Jennifer Homans shows rare insider understanding of Balanchine's inexhaustible creativity... A magnificent and enthralling biography with an epic historical sweep, inflected by the poignancy and sensitivity of an intimate literary portrait * Marina Warner * One of the best stories of a Petersburger coming to America I've ever read. This isn't dutiful biography, this is literature as vibrant and alive as Balanchine's art * Gary Shteyngart, author Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story * Jennifer Homans has not only resurrected George Balanchine down to the perfumed silk foulard, offering up a life of fairy-tale turns and tenacious demons, of prodigious imagination and impossible standards, of five wives and the slew of almost-wives. She has restored the Russia that disappeared out from behind Balanchine and the lush mirage that endured. More remarkably, she pins dance to the page with the precision, intensity, and range her subject prized. The result is lyrical and commanding, among the most electrifying pas de deux you're likely to find on the biography shelf. -- Stacy Schiff * winner of the Pulitzer Prize, New York Times bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra * Jennifer Homans's meticulously researched Mr. B gives us an artist who is as complicated, and even flawed, as he was groundbreaking and brilliant. It is a fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life -- Mikhail Baryshnikov No previous biography of George Balanchine has caught so many of the disparate layers of this superlative choreographer to such revelatory effect -- Alastair Macaulay, Chief Dance Critic * The New York Times * Perfectly calibrated, sympathetic where necessary, fearlessly critical elsewhere, and a much-needed demolition of the Mr. B myths - the flawed genius tropes - that manages, in energetic, evocative prose, to enhance the intellectual and spiritual powers of Balanchine's ballets and the art overall -- Simon Morrison, author of Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today I'm entranced by Homans's chief gifts: her ability to pin a character instantly on the page, bringing to bear the back story and even more distinctively, her own ballet training infusing the story with a rare physicality. Then too there is the deftness of conveying Mr B.'s flaws of cruelty, caprice and autocracy without undermining his art.... Extraordinary -- Lyndall Gordon A sensitive, stately and often thrilling new biography of the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine... Mr B. is a serious act of cultural retrieval, by a writer who knows when to expand and when to collapse, who makes unexpected connections, and who knows when her subject pinches, borrows or steals. The critic, historian and dancer in Homans are nearly always in sync * The New York Times *

Author Information

Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for the New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet was a bestseller and named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine's School of American Ballet, she performed professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available