Mr. B

June 1, 2022

Born under the last tsar and trained at St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet School, George Balanchine left Russia before the revolution and ended up an international star, choreographing hundreds of ballets--many for his celebrated New York City Ballet--that completely changed how we look at dance. From New Yorker dance critic Homans, author of theNew York Times best-selling and multi-best-booked Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet.

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Starred review from August 29, 2022
The legendary choreographer made ballet—and ballerinas—a religion according to this entrancing biography from New Yorker dance critic Homans (Apollo’s Angels). The volume follows Balanchine (1904–1983) from ballet training in Tsarist St. Petersburg through his time starving in revolutionary Petrograd and absorbing avant-garde innovations as an exile in 1920s Europe, to his reign at New York City Ballet beginning in the 1930s. Homans charts a visionary modernism that took Balanchine from pirouetting individualism to an abstract style that immersed dancers in plotless patterns of collective movement, with a “spiritual” cast, influenced by everything from Orthodox icons to Spinoza’s philosophy. Homans’s Balanchine is a charming, supremely competent but also romantic figure, and she focuses on the dynamic of inspiration and attraction between him and his ballerinas—he married several—culminating in his besotted infatuation with the decades-younger Suzanne Farrell, his “grand obsession” who ruled him, Homans contends, until she married another dancer and was (temporarily) cast out. Homans, an ex-ballerina who trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, knows this world well and combines marvelous recreations of dances—“she leaned, spiderlike, almost crawling on his spine”—with novelistic evocations of character. The result is a revelatory, aptly melodramatic portrait of Balanchine and his aesthetic. Photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from October 1, 2022

This empathetic biography of master choreographer George Balanchine (1904-83) is an unqualified success. Homans is the perfect person to write it, being a former professional ballerina, the director of NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts, and the author of the definitive history of modern ballet, Apollo's Angels. It's difficult to overstate Balanchine's contribution to American dance. With Lincoln Kirstein, he founded and led the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet for decades, and he created 465 works, which extended and even broke the conventions of classical ballet. From 1934's Serenade to 1967's Jewels and on, he dispensed with the tradition of dance following a story and instead used dance--his dancers' actions--to create a story. Out of movement, the feeling of story emerges. He's often classified as neoclassical, but there's nothing classical about a choreography that embraces awkward side-walks, -glides, and -turns and elements from modern dance, tap, and show music. Homans's lovingly detailed descriptions of the dances and the challenges they pose to dancers, bring them to life for readers. VERDICT This book will fly off the shelves. It's that good and the subject that absorbing.--David Keymer

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2022
An intricate, meticulously researched biography of the revered and controversial dance icon. George Balanchine (1904-1983), famed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was private about his genius and how he created such beautiful art. He once turned down a request for his biography, saying that his inspiration "is not going to be written down anywhere, for anybody to know." In this engrossing, vivid account of his life, Homans, a former dancer and current critic for the New Yorker, acknowledges her subject's personal failings while also portraying him as a man enjoying the sensuous pleasures of life. After the powerlessness and instability of his childhood in Russia, he fashioned an identity for himself in a world that he could control using a language that he helped create. He spoke through his dancers. The author, who also wrote Apollo's Angels: The History of Ballet, is an expert in her field, and she eschews the task of trying to "define" Balanchine, instead unearthing the various "truths" about him and presenting them without judgment. Homans creates an admiring, honest, and page-turning tribute to this magnetic and complicated figure. Though the text is grounded in conscientious research, the author acknowledges the inability to ever truly "know" a person. The candid admission of Balanchine's fluidity of memory enables Homans to compose a biography that has all of the sumptuousness and lyricism of a fairy tale. She movingly depicts numerous key moments in her subject's life, from his mother miraculously winning the lottery and subsequently losing the fortune to Balanchine being plucked from the examination pool to join the ballet corps of the Imperial Theater School. Given that Balanchine embellished some memories and omitted others from his own narrative, this gripping book reveals a talented artist who feels familiar and yet unknowable and whose greatest creation was quite possibly his own mystique, which still fascinates. The definitive account of a remarkable and flawed artist.

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