Mr B Jennifer Homans
The story of a showman
The dancer and choreographer George Balanchine – recognized to his dancers as “Mr B” – noticed himself as “a musician and theatre man”, a showman who had labored in opera homes and touring troupes, from the Russian czar’s Mariinsky Theater of his youth to the Paris Opera, Broadway theatres, Hollywood motion pictures, and his personal New York Metropolis Ballet, based in 1948, which had greater than 100 dancers at his demise in 1983.
He described himself as “a cloud in trousers” (after Mayakovsky’s poem) and dancers usually referred to him as “the breath”, which means spirit. For Balanchine was cut up between physicality (trousers) and spirit: he was sensual, a lover of high-quality wine and exquisite girls, particularly his younger dancers, whom he nurtured (“he gathered and formed them, making his personal paints and pigments from their flesh and blood”) and with whom he usually fell in love. Based on Balanchine, “every little thing a person does, he does for his ideally suited lady.” However there was additionally a profound inwardness to Balanchine that made him unusually indifferent from the world, “like an angel who is aware of every little thing however feels nothing”.
Georgi Balanchivadze was born in St Petersburg in 1904. He was accepted into the Imperial Theater Faculty on the age of 9. The ballet academics favored his “slight physique, straight posture and calm exterior”. His older sister was rejected the identical day. As a baby, he skilled chilly and hunger in revolutionary Russia: “the concern of gnawing starvation and acrid odor of lifeless our bodies piled within the streets in these early years by no means actually left him”. However as Jennifer Homans factors out in her Baillie Gifford prize shortlisted guide, the revolution that ruined his childhood additionally offered the supply of his genius.
He fled Russia in 1924, going first to Weimar Germany (“he had a knack for swallowing dying civilizations entire and getting out”), then Paris, the place he labored with Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe. In 1933, he went to America the place he created “a music-filled monument to religion and unreason, to physique and wonder. It was his personal counterrevolutionary world of the spirit.” In the course of the Cuban Missile Disaster, Balanchine returned to the Soviet Union with the New York Metropolis Ballet. When a outstanding Moscow critic instructed Balanchine he had no soul, “he sharply retorted that since Soviet critics didn’t consider in God, they couldn’t know in regards to the soul”.
Homans educated at Balanchine’s New York ballet faculty, the place she watched him rehearse and took courses with him. She has additionally carried out in his ballets and attended Balanchine’s funeral at New York’s Russian Orthodox church. She spent a decade penning this magisterial biography, an expertise she describes as “the best journey and problem of my skilled life”.
It’s a suitably weighty tome (greater than 700 pages), however it’s brilliantly crafted and a pleasure to learn. Certainly, her accounts of his “lovely, glamorous, superb, unusual, outrageous, at instances grotesque” dances are each illuminating and deeply shifting. This outstanding examine takes us into the thoughts of one of many nice artistic forces of the twentieth century and in Homan’s palms his life-story turns into a heartfelt celebration of the ability of recent dance.
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