MR. B

An intricate, meticulously researched biography of the revered and controversial dance icon.

George Balanchine (1904-1983), famed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was private about his genius and how he created such beautiful art. He once turned down a request for his biography, saying that his inspiration “is not going to be written down anywhere, for anybody to know.” In this engrossing, vivid account of his life, Homans, a former dancer and current critic for the New Yorker, acknowledges her subject’s personal failings while also portraying him as a man enjoying the sensuous pleasures of life. After the powerlessness and instability of his childhood in Russia, he fashioned an identity for himself in a world that he could control using a language that he helped create. He spoke through his dancers. The author, who also wrote Apollo’s Angels: The History of Ballet, is an expert in her field, and she eschews the task of trying to “define” Balanchine, instead unearthing the various “truths” about him and presenting them without judgment. Homans creates an admiring, honest, and page-turning tribute to this magnetic and complicated figure. Though the text is grounded in conscientious research, the author acknowledges the inability to ever truly “know” a person. The candid admission of Balanchine's fluidity of memory enables Homans to compose a biography that has all of the sumptuousness and lyricism of a fairy tale. She movingly depicts numerous key moments in her subject’s life, from his mother miraculously winning the lottery and subsequently losing the fortune to Balanchine being plucked from the examination pool to join the ballet corps of the Imperial Theater School. Given that Balanchine embellished some memories and omitted others from his own narrative, this gripping book reveals a talented artist who feels familiar and yet unknowable and whose greatest creation was quite possibly his own mystique, which still fascinates.

The definitive account of a remarkable and flawed artist.