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LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2023

From the author of Apollo’s Angels, the first major biography of the figure who modernised dance: an intimate portrait of the man behind the mythology, set against the vibrant backdrop of the century that shaped him

Balanchine’s radical approach to choreography reinvented the art of dance and his richly evocative ballets made him a lasting legend. Today, nearly thirty years after his death, the man is still so revered that the mysteries of his biography are often overlooked. Who was George Balanchine?

Born in Russia under the last Czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War One, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War Two and the cultural Cold War; he was part of the Russian modernist moment, a key player in Paris in the 1920s, and in New York he revolutionized ballet, pressing it to the forefront of modernism and making it serious and popular art.

His influences were myriad. He considered himself Georgian, yet he did not step foot in his ancestral homeland until he was in his fifties. He was deeply influenced by the cold grandeur and sensuous beauty of the Orthodox Church, but equally absorbed by the new rhythms and dance steps coming out of Harlem in the 1930s. He collaborated broadly, with figures like Diaghilev and Stravinsky.

A man of muses, Balanchine was married five times, always to young dancers, and consumed by many other loves in between. The difficulties of his life – personal losses, bouts of ill health, debilitating loneliness and dark moods of despair – resonate in his dances, which speak so poignantly of love and loss, and yet the full implications for his art remain unexplored.

Now for the first time we look beyond the myth of ‘Mr B’ – the mask which Balanchine himself helped to create – to see ‘Mr B’ the man.

Publisher Review

With unique expertise in dance and what it means to dance, Jennifer Homans shows rare insider understanding of Balanchine's inexhaustible creativity... A magnificent and enthralling biography with an epic historical sweep, inflected by the poignancy and sensitivity of an intimate literary portrait * Marina Warner * One of the best stories of a Petersburger coming to America I've ever read. This isn't dutiful biography, this is literature as vibrant and alive as Balanchine's art * Gary Shteyngart, author Our Country Friends and Super Sad True Love Story * Jennifer Homans has not only resurrected George Balanchine down to the perfumed silk foulard, offering up a life of fairy-tale turns and tenacious demons, of prodigious imagination and impossible standards, of five wives and the slew of almost-wives. She has restored the Russia that disappeared out from behind Balanchine and the lush mirage that endured. More remarkably, she pins dance to the page with the precision, intensity, and range her subject prized. The result is lyrical and commanding, among the most electrifying pas de deux you're likely to find on the biography shelf. -- Stacy Schiff * winner of the Pulitzer Prize, New York Times bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra * Jennifer Homans's meticulously researched Mr. B gives us an artist who is as complicated, and even flawed, as he was groundbreaking and brilliant. It is a fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for beauty in art and in life -- Mikhail Baryshnikov No previous biography of George Balanchine has caught so many of the disparate layers of this superlative choreographer to such revelatory effect -- Alastair Macaulay, Chief Dance Critic * The New York Times * Perfectly calibrated, sympathetic where necessary, fearlessly critical elsewhere, and a much-needed demolition of the Mr. B myths - the flawed genius tropes - that manages, in energetic, evocative prose, to enhance the intellectual and spiritual powers of Balanchine's ballets and the art overall -- Simon Morrison, author of Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today I'm entranced by Homans's chief gifts: her ability to pin a character instantly on the page, bringing to bear the back story and even more distinctively, her own ballet training infusing the story with a rare physicality. Then too there is the deftness of conveying Mr B.'s flaws of cruelty, caprice and autocracy without undermining his art.... Extraordinary -- Lyndall Gordon A sensitive, stately and often thrilling new biography of the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine... 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 * The New York Times *