Roger Viollet via Getty
Long before he died in 1983, George Balanchine had established himself as the 20th-century’s most important ballet choreographer. How a poor boy who was born in pre-revolutionary Russia and fled the Soviet Union at age 20 managed to accomplish this feat is the subject of Jennifer Homans’s massive new biography, Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century.
Homans trained in dance at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and is currently the dance critic for The New Yorker. She is the ideal person to tell Balanchine’s story. She is able to bring Balanchine’s dances to life, even for readers who have never seen them, through her detailed descriptions, and she never lets us forget the dark shadow the repressive Soviet Union cast over Balanchine both when he was growing up and later during the Cold War.
In Balanchine’s hands, modern ballet was no longer primarily about telling a story or completing a narrative. Just as for an abstract artist such as Jackson Pollock, the paint on the canvas is the true focus, for Balanchine the true focus of ballet is the body in motion.