NEW YORK, NY.- Opera is all about saying goodbye, Virgil Thomson is reputed to have said, and ballet is all about saying hello.
In “Mr. B,” a sensitive, stately and often thrilling new biography of Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, Jennifer Homans finds a bittersweet tone to capture Balanchine’s many leave-takings — the way he was chased, as if he were Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, across the first half of the 20th century.
When World War I arrived, Balanchine was a young dance student in czarist Russia. Three years later, at 13, he was forced to scavenge for food when the revolution disrupted his life. He spent the interwar years shuffling between Weimar Berlin, before Hitler put an end to that decadent and creative intellectual milieu, and Paris, London and Monte Carlo, Monaco.
He fled for the United States before World War II. He taught ballet and choreographed for Broadway and Hollywood before, alongside impresario Lincoln Kirstein, he founded what would become the New York City Ballet, America’s de facto national ballet company, in 1948. There he almost single-handedly revitalized the language of an increasingly brittle and conservative art form.
Homans’ book, as these details suggest, plays out in widescreen — as if it’s being projected, “Doctor Zhivago”-style, in 35 mm in one of those now-extinct, airplane hangar-size theaters in midtown. There are two intermissions, in the form of generous photo inserts.
For all its somber goodbyes, “Mr. B” (as his dancers called him) is light on its toes. It keeps finding fresh ways to say hello. For a big book, nearly 800 pages, it’s notably tactile. Homans is the dance critic of The New Yorker and the author of “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet” (2010). She’s also a former professional dancer, trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet.
Her dance background matters. “Mr. B” has a scuffed and well-rosined sense of dance at floor level: the discipline, pain, injuries and exhaustion, the aching tendons and joints and ligaments, that lurk beneath an art form that seeks to transcend all traces of that agony.
Homans pauses regularly to deposit us directly into a classroom or onto a stage. We’re right beside Balanchine, for example, when he starts class at his first ballet school, absorbing the oldest lessons:
“First position, heels together, toes open, hand on the barre to steady the unbalanced body, arms down, back straight up through the spine, shoulders relaxed and wide, belly button pulled to the vertebrae, bones aligned. Release the excess, muscles wrapped around flesh, simplify, simplify, simplify. It is basic: Find the axis. Drop a plumb line from the top of the head down through the spine into the heels in first position, divide the body down this center, right from left. Turn out the legs, turn out the feet, turn out the hips, turn out the spine.”
Physical details drift unfussily toward the metaphysical. About dancing under Balanchine’s tutelage, Homans writes:
“Dancing pared the body, honed the musculature, subtly shifted bones. Training was transformation, and working with Balanchine involved a kind of metamorphosis entangled with pain, self-destruction and shame, but also with desire and joy. External form could even harmonize a fractured inner life, at least in the moment of dancing. It didn’t erase a person’s faults or dull her anxieties, but it did hold out the promise of a more ordered soul. At peak the dancer felt fluid and strong, integrated, coordinated and above all clarified. Less mass and less food clogging the system (more blood to muscles) added to the feeling of the body as ‘true light’ and a well-lubricated machine. Even the salty sweat purged through the ritual exercise of daily class felt like an unburdening, a purification that set a dancer apart from her unholy and civilian self. She was a different creature, part of a tribe, a chosen member of art.”
This isn’t the first life of Balanchine. Robert Gottlieb published a short, avuncular one in 2004; Terry Teachout published a short, less avuncular one that same year. There’s Bernard Taper’s intimate 1996 biography, based on many interviews with Balanchine. But, 10 years in the making, Homan’s book feels like the first full-dress life.
It’s based on a battery of interviews, including nearly 200 alone with Balanchine’s former dancers, whom as a group Homans refers to as “unusually eccentric and fascinating” and “forbiddingly tight-knit.” Many have written memoirs of their own (Suzanne Farrell, Bettijane Sills, Merrill Ashley and Toni Bentley, among them), most of which are largely fond.
Balanchine (1904-83) was born in St. Petersburg to unwed parents. His father, Georgian opera singer and composer Meliton Balanchivadze, seems to have come more fully into the family’s life after young George’s mother, Maria, won the state lottery. George’s older sister, Tamara, was supposed to be the dancer. But when she was taken to audition for the venerable Imperial Theater School, George was chosen instead. The family dumped him there, as if at a forbidding prep school.
Balanchine is an unusual subject for what critics like to call, and I’ll go there, a magisterial biography. He was a shy, somewhat receding figure. He had a facial tic, a nervous fluttering under one eye, that got him called “the rat” as a child. He was of average size, though he had strong hands from the piano and his fondness for gardening and other outdoor work.
He had tuberculosis as a young man and could seem frail. He was a bit of a loner. Homans refers to his “inverse charisma, a quiet inner certainty.” He had the detachment, she writes, of a survivor. He seemed to live primarily through his dancers. He had fine, dark, melancholy features that made him irresistible to women.
In her novel “A Feather on the Breath of God” (1995), which contains some of the most intuitive writing I’m aware of about ballet, Sigrid Nunez says there are times when it seems to her that “ballet was about nothing but sex.” Nunez compares toe shoes to erections; a dancer’s tutu is “a frilly target board with her crotch for bull’s-eye.”
Homans spends a lot of time on, circling and circling again, Balanchine and women and sex and power. He married four times, always to dancers, and lived with a fifth in a common-law marriage. It’s well known that he had affairs with many of his principal dancers — nearly all of them swan-necked, long-waisted, with improbable wingspans — and he played favorites. His stormy relationship with Farrell is among this book’s most gripping set pieces. As he grew older, the age gaps widened.
Was he a monster? Homans lays out the facts like a prosecutor — there were abortions — but hesitates to break him on a wheel. Balanchine was more interested in teaching his dancers how to live, she suggests, than in sleeping with them, and they responded to him. She writes that he was vastly more loved than feared.
“They did not complain, not then, not later. They weren’t looking for consistency or high moral character. They didn’t expect the man to live up to his art; and they didn’t ask him to be as beautiful, sad, joyous, erotic or strange as his dances; didn’t assume that because he dealt with matters of the soul, his own soul would be clear or settled. The question didn’t arise in part because they — at least the ones who lasted — were ruthless too. Had to be. At some level, they accepted it all, which is perhaps why even those who were most hurt overwhelmingly defend him. Working with him and dancing his ballets was quite simply the most powerful experience of their lives.”
Homans rejects the notion that the New York City Ballet was a cult, but it was certainly cultlike. He shopped for his favorite dancers, dressed them, bought them signature perfumes, got them photographed by Vogue, showed them the world. They felt, Homans implies, he’d handed them tickets to the rest of their lives.
The author immerses herself in other difficult subjects, notably the painful thinness that Balanchine required of his dancers (he posted a handwritten sign that read: “BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY — YOU MUST WEIGH!), and the company’s paucity of Black female dancers. Balanchine revered Black dance and borrowed from it. He was a pioneer in terms of staging interracial duets. But he did not push hard enough, and the company, all these decades later, remains painfully monochromatic.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who did not speak English well, learned that he could get through an evening in America by alternating two phrases: “Scotch and soda” and “Why not?” When Balanchine arrived in America in 1933, he knew three phrases: “OK, kid,” “scram” and “one swell guy.”
He had a liberal mind but, given his experience with communism, a conservative gut. He learned to love good food and nice hotels, but otherwise he did not keep track of, or care about, money. He disliked wealthy people and had few material possessions. He didn’t write things down. Many of his dances are lost to time. He did little planning for New York City Ballet’s future.
“Mr. B” is a serious act of cultural retrieval, by a writer who knows when to expand and when to collapse, who makes unexpected connections, and who knows when her subject pinches, borrows or steals. The critic, historian and dancer in Homans are nearly always in sync.
There are long sections, more interesting than they might be, on the making of his best ballets, and his worst. I doubt I’m alone in thinking that if I have to sit through “Stars and Stripes” again, I’ll leap from the fourth ring.
In 1971 his ballet “PAMTGG,” based on the advertising jingle “Pan Am Makes the Going Great,” premiered in Manhattan. Homans calls it “maybe the worst ballet he ever made.” The NYCB should consider restaging it; it might become a perennial cult hit, a “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” and demonstrate that the company has a sense of humor.
His best ballets were and are, Homans writes, “fantastic entertainments that lifted audiences into the great good humor of being alive.” They’re still saying hello.
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Publication Notes:
“Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century”
By Jennifer Homans
Illustrated
769 pages. Random House. $40
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
