Shop

ByJennifer Homans

Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth centuryThe New York Timescalled him the Shakespeare of dancing.His radical approach to choreographyand lifereinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based onmore than one hundredinterviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas,Mr. Bcarries us through Balanchines tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances.

Balanchines lifeintersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the lastczar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and we see his loneliness and failures, his five marriagesall to dancersand many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibilityand his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.

With full access to Balanchines papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic forThe New Yorkerand a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchines life and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists:the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.