Mr. B : George Balanchine’s 20th century by Jennifer Homans. -2022 - 1234 Page

 Mr. B : George Balanchine’s 20th century by Jennifer Homans. -2022 - 1234 Pages

On Saturday, May 20, BIO was proud to announce the winner of this year's Plutarch Award, presented to the best biography of 2022.  

A big congratulations to Jennifer Homans, author of MR. B: GEORGE BALANCHINE'S 20th CENTURY. It's a truly extraordinary book.

George Balanchine

January 22, 1904- St. Petersburg Russia

1913- age 9, accepted into Imperial Ballet School

1917- The Fall of the Tsarist regime 

1924- leaves Russia to tour Europe- settles in Paris

1933- moves to New York City

1938 - Hollywood Calls

Along the way he marries five of his dancers and has numerous relationships

He creates and produces incredible ballets, he returns to Russia in an tour based in his mind on showing American based ballet is superior to Russian. He was vehemently anti-communist and proud to be an American.

April 30, 1983 he passes away in New York City.

This book is a masterpiece. If you have been into ballet all your life you will treasure it, if like me, you have never seen a ballet you will be overwhelmed by the extreme cultural depth of the world Jennifer Homans has presented. The cast of characters is immense, fascinating. The story begins in pre-revoluntunary Russia,suffers through the fall of the Tsar,with young George eating rats, lingers for a while then proceeds to Paris, travels in Weimer Germany, spends a bit of time in London then settles in New York City with some interludes in Hollywood.

There is just so much in this book. I will just talk about a few of the things that jumped out at me. One was Balanchine’s attitude toward women. He loved women but he could be cruel, firing a dancer for gaining a few pounds, pressuring his dancers not to have boyfriends, especially husbands and avoid pregnancy. Dancers, male and female, wanted very much to please him, being given a starring role in a Balanchine production meant everything.

He was an avid life time reader. Among his core texts were Don Quioxte, Tolstoy, Nietsche's The Birth of Tradgedy, Gogol, and the Bible. He was a Russian Orthodox Christian. The ballet world attracted gay men, as dancers and patrons. There seems no indication Balanchine had same sex relations but his principal financial backers did. As time went on he had romantic relations with women 30 or more years younger than him. Some had boyfriends who accepted his relationship, perhaps with pecuniary motives.  

Balanchine liked fine restaurants, cooking, wine, giving jewellery to dancers he liked. His finances were handled by a long time aid. People often would work many years for him, he inspired loyalty. Above all he loved the dance.

I was thrilled by his love for my favourite post Tsarist novel, The Master and Margarita. I think I will try to reread it based on the information given by Homans. I smiled when I learned Coco Chanel designed some costumes. I am familiar with the history of the Warburg family and enjoyed reading about Eddie Warburg's support of Balanchine’s dance company.

Balanchine was fascinated by Sufi mysticism. He wanted to incorporate African American music and dancers in his productions. He brought in dancers from the Harlem Ballet company.His work was often very sexually charged.

He eventually got very large grants from the Ford Foundation which were used in part to fund hundreds of ballet scholarships.

As he aged he had serious health issues. In his will he left various dances to individual dancers.  

We get to know lots of people, some famous like Stravinsky, Balanchine’s wives and sundry girl friends, business managers.

Homans spent ten years working on Mr. B : George Balanchine’s 20th century, she interviewed over 200 persons. I will let her tell us how working on this book impacted her.

"researching Balanchine for this book has been the greatest adventure and challenge of my professional life. I worked for over a decade, and he led me to archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas and into vast areas of literature, music, and art: Sufism andmysticism, Plato, Galen, Spinoza, Goethe, Cervantes, and Hoffmann, to mention a few favorites, along with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Mayakovsky, Blok, and Bulgakov—and the Bible, always the Bible. I found myself immersed in art from icons and religious and Renaissance painting to Malevich, Beckmann, Dalí, Gross, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Tchelitchew—many of whom Balanchine knew and worked with. I learned about starvation, TB, polio, mad cow disease, and other ailments that afflicted his body and threatened his life. I went to St. Petersburg and retraced his childhood path and followed him to Georgia, themythic land he claimed as his own but only laid eyes on in 1962 at the height of the Cold War. I met what family remains, found his mother’s home, and stood by his father’s grave; I traveled to the Gelati Monastery up a winding road high on a misty peak, where an old photo shows Balanchine gazing at the ancient frescoes, outlawed as objects of veneration by the Soviets in their anti-God fury. I went to the hospital in Copenhagen where he cared for his fifth wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, after she was stricken with polio, and traversed the streets and canals of the city. I climbed the stairs of his apartment in Paris ...The cast of characters was huge, from the family he left in Russia, the towering roles played by Lincoln Kirstein and Jerome Robbins, his five wives and many loves, right down to the last stagehand at the theater. He seemed to stand at the apex of all their lives..Music, Balanchine’s holiest of holies, took me from Bach, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky through to Stravinsky, Hindemith, Ives, American jazz, and the experiments of Xenakis." From the Preface

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 ten 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

I eagerly anticipate reading her Appolo's Angels: A History of Ballet next month.

YouTube has videos of several Balanchine ballets and interviews with dancers from his companies.

I was thrilled to see The Manila Ballet Company will feature one of Balanchine’s most famous works, Don Quioxte next month.

Mel Ulm