Mr. B
George Balanchine's 20th Century
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
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Publisher Description
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • “A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV
Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best Biography and the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize
Based on a decade of unprecedented research, the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called “the Shakespeare of dancing”—from the bestselling author of Apollo’s Angels
New York Times Editors’ Choice • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, Oprah Daily
Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century—The New York Times called him “the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances.
Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriages—all to dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.
With full access to Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
