Mr. Ball-an-chain

At the age of nine George Balanchine (ne Georgi Balanchivadze) was entered by his mother as a student at the Imperial Dance School in St. Petersburg. The boy Georgi felt no special affinity for dance, and, had he his druthers, would have become a cadet in the Tsar’s army. “I hated the school,” he reports of his first year there. “I was certain I had no aptitude for dancing and was wasting my time and the Tsar’s money.” He hung on, and in his second year was hooked after dancing with the male corps de ballet on the stage of the famous Mariinsky Theatre. By the age of 16 he had choreographed a short ballet to Rubinstein’s La Nuit. He would go on to become one of the three great choreographers in the history of ballet—the other two being Marius Petipa (1818-1910) and Mikhail Fokine (1880-1942).

George Balanchine choreographed some 425 ballets, many of which have been lost. Some of his earlier ballets appeared before they could be recorded on video; but, even those that were recorded, he fairly regularly tweaked, sometimes changing them radically. He didn’t believe in the usefulness of dance notation. Early in her recent biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans lists four of his youthful light ballets, then notes: “All these dances are gone.” Other ballets, she reports, “have since disappeared.” How many great ballets have been lost cannot be known with certainty. The point is the ephemerality of much ballet.

Mr. B, Homans’s biography, weighing in at nearly 800 pages, is as thoroughgoing, not to say definitive, a biography of George Balanchine as one might wish. Formerly a dancer who has performed with the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Homans has been the dance critic of the New Republic and is currently the dance critic of the New Yorker. She writes well, with precision and wit, authority and insight, on ballet, a subject not always available in its rich intricacies even to those who think themselves balletomanes. No biography of a great artist is ever the last word on its subject, but Homans’s Mr. B, nicely balanced between George Balanchine’s personal and professional lives, is unlikely to be superseded for a long while.

Born in 1904, Balanchine was 10 when World War I broke out, 13 when the revolution changed just about everything he had known in Russian