The miracle is that Balanchine arrived at such a view of the future of ballet and realized it with the New York City Ballet. As he repeatedly acknowledged, they were built around the movement, shape, and drive of the individual dancer. 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.īut in Balanchine’s case, there was nothing abstract about his plotless ballets. In Balanchine’s hands, modern ballet was no longer primarily about telling a story or completing a narrative. 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. She is the ideal person to tell Balanchine’s story. Homans trained in dance at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet and is currently the dance critic for The New Yorker. 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. Long before he died in 1983, George Balanchine had established himself as the 20th-century’s most important ballet choreographer.
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