Hi, dance friends. I’m Margaret Fuhrer, editor and producer of The Dance Edit newsletter and podcast.

We have a brand-new interview episode to kick off 2023, featuring the dance writer and historian Jennifer Homans. Homans is The New Yorker‘s dance critic, the founder and director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and the author of the acclaimed ballet history Apollo’s Angels, which came out in 2010.

Now she has a new book out, titled Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. It’s a biography of an artist who, as this audience does not really need to be reminded, had a profound effect on the ballet ecosystem. Arguably one of the greatest choreographers of all time—certainly one of the most influential—Balanchine reshaped the whole culture of ballet around his ideals and methods.

Homans’ book, which came out late last year, is the product of almost unimaginably thorough research conducted over more than a decade. She left no stone, no archival source, unturned. Unsurprisingly, that process revealed many new insights into how Balanchine thought about dance and making dance, and how his experiences with war and exile and tragedy formed his artistic sensibilities. It also revealed undeniable evidence of his cruelty, particularly towards the women who were also his creative muses.

I talked with Jennifer about how she chose to weave all of the different threads of Balanchine’s life together—the beautiful ones and the ugly ones—and about the themes that run through the resulting tapestry. Here she is.

[pause]

Margaret Fuhrer:

Jennifer, hello. Welcome. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Jennifer Homans:

Thank you for having me.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Congratulations on the publication of Mr. B, which is astounding work of scholarship. I was hoping that you might be willing to start today, actually at the place where the book ends, in the concluding author’s note. Would you talk a bit about your own personal encounters as a dancer with Balanchine and his technique and repertory? Because reading this book, one feels that you have lived this artist’s work that way.

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, no, I feel I’ve been in pursuit of Balanchine in a way or in presence of Balanchine for my whole life, pretty much. I started as a dancer. I was trained partially at the School of American Ballet. Certainly, it was the most important place I trained. This was in the ’70s, so he was still alive, and I was at the theater every night and just completely mesmerized by this experience. I came from an academic family, and so, it was a world that I didn’t know before.

And it felt, on the one hand, like I was being dropped into a little Russia, because the teachers seemed to be mostly Russian and they were always speaking Russian. There was this aura of that world and of a very old world that I was fascinated with from the beginning. I watched Balanchine rehearse at times. I had an opportunity to take a class with him. I worked with many of his closest dancers, including Suzanne Farrell and Maria Tallchief. So, I had a good exposure at an age when it just seemed like the most normal thing in the world and what else was there? But it stayed with me for a very, very long time.

And one of the reasons I wrote this book is that I just felt it had been probably the seminal experience of my life, and I wanted to understand it better than I did. I feel like I had a great privilege to do the research on this project for 10 years because it was endlessly fascinating. And I was quite obsessed with discovering this world that I had been affected by, even if I hadn’t danced with the company or been part of that world in a full, full way.

Margaret Fuhrer:

You’re starting to answer my next question, because, of course, there are other biographies of Balanchine out there. In addition to this personal connection that you have to him and his work, what was the “why” for your book, and the “why now”? What aspects of his story did you maybe feel like had not been fully told?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, I felt that a lot of time had now passed. Many of those books were written either while he was alive or soon after his death, and they were written by people who knew him personally. Obviously, I didn’t know him personally, although I saw him work, but it’s been decades now. And so, there’s a way in which there’s a possibility. I’m a trained historian, and looking back, it’s hard to do when you don’t have a bit of time to absorb what’s happened and just understand the period as well as the person. So, that was one reason.

Another reason was that I felt that the other biographies hadn’t really been interested in looking to archival sources, and partly that’s because they had the archival sources—they were live people that they had as sources, so that is completely understandable. But I was interested in going into the archives, in whatever way they existed, and that was part of the discovery process. In addition to doing a lot of interviews and traveling to a lot of places that he had been and seeing them and experiencing them myself, so that I could write about them more accurately.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Can you talk a little about some of the archival sources in particular that you found illuminating? Things that had previously gone unexplored?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah. I think the first one was really the letters that he had written to Zorina when they were in the midst of their then-failing love affair and marriage. And these letters were always there. It’s just we hadn’t looked at them yet in a close way. And they were very interesting to me because they’re in his hand, and they were written when his English was very sketchy, and a lot of misspelling and phrasing, strange phrasing, and not easy to read, but very revealing of him and the ways in which he experienced love. And intensely romantic, intensely suffering. So, that was one thing.

There were other things as mundane as credit card records that tell you where someone has been, what they’ve been doing, where they’ve been spending money. So, there are levels of different archival sources, from those passionate letters to these prosaic sorts of things that can really help you reconstruct a world. So, those are two examples. There are many others. We can talk about them if you’d like.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Well, I was going to say I was especially fascinated by the material you include from Balanchine’s own notebooks, which are now in your own personal collection. Is that right? I was looking in the end notes, and I was like, “Collection of the author”? My goodness!

Jennifer Homans:

Over 10 years, I was in a lot of attics and a lot of basements, and people gave me things just because I think they didn’t know what else to do with them. Obviously, those will all go to an archive sometime soon. But yes, those, they’re not even notebooks. It’s like one notebook that he had written, made some sketches, especially sketches…

Margaret Fuhrer:

Sketches, yeah.

Jennifer Homans:

… for what became obvious to me, the minute I saw it, it was Apollo. And there’s a few other sketches in there and a lot of doodles. He was a big doodler. And there are a lot of doodles in the Harvard archives as well where his papers are held. And one of the other very fascinating things I found in his hand was a series of notes on his choreographic process that were really just scraps of paper. He wasn’t a writer, so he wasn’t taking notes. I think he was just writing down ideas here and there. These notes were in a file in the archive that was dedicated to the piece that eventually appeared, ghost written by someone else. So, those were fascinating, and I tried to reproduce as many of them as I could, just as I tried to reproduce the letters so that people could experience them themselves.

Margaret Fuhrer:

And then of course, as you mentioned, you also interviewed a huge number of dancers. It feels like everybody who touched Balanchine in any way and is still alive you talked to.

Jennifer Homans:

I tried. I missed some, but I tried.

Margaret Fuhrer:

What did you find emerged as the central through lines in those interviews as you were conducting them?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, I thought in the beginning that the interviews weren’t going to be the most important thing. And I was wrong and so, I quickly saw that. I understood very early on that the archives were going to be there forever, so I put them aside and did them later. But the people were incredibly interesting as people. And so, I started to take a lot of time with them and really question them, not just about Balanchine, but perhaps their own lives and what they had wanted and how they saw it now. And anywhere they took me, I would go.

I really did find them completely engrossing as a project, which is what in a way it was for me. And so, I just kept on talking to people and moving on to the next and the next, trying to make sure I got people who were very old very soon so that I would have a chance to talk to them before they passed on. And I learned so much from them, from listening to them.

And there was in a way…of course, a lot of it was about the experience of being a woman dancing in that company, and there’s quite a lot of material about that. What I really came to see it as was a chorus, in a way. And it wasn’t unanimous in the sense of it was they were all saying exactly the same thing, but they were saying similar things a lot of the time. I tried to put down their testimony, really, because as I was listening to them, I was thinking, “Wow, we haven’t really heard their voices.” We have the voices of some of the principal dancers and people who’ve written memoirs, of course, but as a group and the ones who were less famous, it was really interesting to me.

And also I felt that Balanchine knew his dancers very well. And so if I was going to understand what he was trying to do with them, I had to know them well too, or at least as well as I could in the circumstances, which were of course, quite different. But that was some of what I was thinking as I was trying to…I always transcribe their interviews myself by hand because it was a way of being immersed in it. It took tons of time, but it was a way of being immersed in what they said. And when you transcribe something you have time, because I’m a slow writer, so you have time to think about it as you’re doing it, and that was very useful too. So, felt like I was in dialogue with them, both when I was in their presence, but also when I was transcribing their words.

Margaret Fuhrer:

During this research process, did you find that your preexisting picture of Balanchine was mostly confirmed and deepened, or were there surprises?

Jennifer Homans:

No. There were a lot of surprises. I had grown up with what I came to think of as a myth of Balanchine, which was—it has many aspects, but some of them were this idea of this, sort of motto that people say all the time, “Don’t think, just dance.” And this idea that words were somehow not part of dancing and that they were just two separate enterprises and you couldn’t mix them. And in fact, words were in the way. And I do think he believed that in many ways.

But one of the surprises was that he was a very well-read and curious person who just gathered information everywhere, from literature, Quixote, Cervantes. He read Algorta. He read mysticism. He read Spinoza. He read Hegel. He read Nietzsche. He was widely read in philosophy and in what Lincoln Kirstein called, he was amateur theologian. And that was true.

In addition, he was really interested in science fiction and American popular culture. These things we knew a little bit more about already. And the Bible, that was a major text for him. So, I was very interested in the text that he was taken by. And it’s interesting that he didn’t talk a lot about that, even though he would say to a dancer here and there, “Go read Tolstoy. Go read War and Peace.” Immersing myself in Russian literature was part of the project of doing this book as well.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Well, talking about the myth of Balanchine, the period when you were working on this book must have been a particularly charged time to be writing a Balanchine biography, in that people have been, especially during this period, beginning more frequently to question the hagiographic elements of that myth that’s been the standard narrative for a long time. There have been calls especially for a better reckoning with his failings as a man, especially in terms of his treatment of women, and how his sometimes reprehensible behavior shaped ballet culture as a whole. And we see you grappling with all of this in the book. Can you talk about how you approached those aspects of the story?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, that was another thing that I certainly learned both through interviews and through archival sources. So, when you have a convergence like that of memory and archival fact, you are in the presence of something that is undeniable and that you have to address, is how I felt. And so, his cruelty, which, he could be the kindest, most civil person, and astonishingly cruel and misogynistic even towards the women that he also loved.

I felt that what my job was, the way I approached it—and I thought about this quite a lot because of the reasons, especially, that you give, that we were living through this whole moment of reckoning and still are—and I felt that as a historian, what my job was really was to present what I had found out and what I knew and what they had told me and what the written record told us, in “just the facts, ma’am” style, just to lay it out. And that was partly because I didn’t know any other way to do it except to just lay it out. I wasn’t really interested in passing judgment or moralizing about it, because I don’t really feel that’s the role of the historian or what I was doing. But of course, by laying it out, I was bringing it also to the fore and giving it a place, which I felt was important.

And then people will have it and they can make of it what they will. Because obviously, these kinds of moral standards existed while he was living, but they were different. And they’re different now and they’ll be different later. So, my job was to say what it was, what he did, what they said, what we know, or what I was able to find out.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Talking about the standards of his time, the subtitle of the book, George Balanchine’s 20th Century, it seems to suggest that Balanchine’s work both shaped an era and was shaped by the political and social forces of that era. I guess in Balanchine’s case, in looking at his faults as well as his genius, how much do you think historical context does or should matter? Saying that he’s a product of his time, how much does that explain, and also not explain, his behavior and his way of thinking?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And I really don’t like the, “He’s a product of his time.” It seems almost like an excuse or something. It’s true, of course. He was of his time, and there were many kinds of different behaviors. I guess what interested me was, why did he do it and what was going on inside him?

That was my subject. What was going on inside him, and what was the dynamic and the complexity of the relationship with his dancers? Because in spite of his cruelty, many of the dancers say that these were the greatest years of their lives. So, making sense of that and trying to understand what was going on between them, that was really a more interesting goal to me.

And the idea of George Balanchine’s 20th Century had two meanings to me. And the first was, here’s a man who really lived a 20th-century life. And his life is—his art absorbed a lot of the history that he lived through, from imperial Russia to the revolution, to Paris, Weimar, Europe in the twenties, and the American story from 1933 through the post-war period until his death in 1983. So, there’s so much there, from war and revolution to the Cold War, to the ’60s in America. It’s a huge and rich story, and he was in interesting places at almost every moment of his life. So, the George Balanchine’s 20th Century is the sweep of his life and how it was incorporated into his…to become an art.

And then it also had another meaning for me, which I hope people will understand as they read the book, which is that in a way, his life moves from fact to fiction very seamlessly. And so, there’s a way in which he’s making, this is his made-up 20th century, too. The dances, after all, are an imaginative act. He’s bringing them into the world and making them up out of the pieces and objects and vision and sight that he, and the music, of course, that he experienced in the course of his own life. So, it’s his imagined, it’s his 20th century in that sense, too.

Margaret Fuhrer:

His corner that he has carved…

Jennifer Homans:

Exactly, the way he like to put it, right?

Margaret Fuhrer:

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Homans:

My little place. This is my little place. You can do whatever you want over there, but I’m doing this here.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Another part of the conventional narrative about Balanchine is, “Oh, he’s the artist who made ballet neoclassical or made it abstract.” And you say that that’s true, but not the whole truth. So, acknowledging that I’m asking you now to paraphrase your own words in the book for the benefit of this listenership, why do you believe that’s too narrow?

Jennifer Homans:

I guess two reasons, or at least two reasons. One is that I feel that he… he, himself always said, “What’s neoclassical? That’s your word, not mine.” And I think even abstraction—he did both of those things, but that’s not all he did. He had a vast range. He came from that imperial world. He understood that Russian classicism. He both brought it with him and completely changed it. So, is it neoclassicism? I suppose you could call it that, but the bigger question is, well, how did he change it? What’s the “neo” in the neoclassicism?

But also, he was a theater man, and he did everything from commedia dell’arte to Agon, and from this huge story ballet of Quixote to the sparest works of the Stravinsky Festival, so his range is huge. And he was both classical and incredibly avant-garde. He was on the edge of everything and wanted to be, or not on the edge of everything, on the edge of his own work. He was always pushing himself to another kind of music, another place he wanted, as he put it, to be progressive.

He didn’t want to be establishment and bourgeois, and he lived sparsely. He didn’t want to settle, and he didn’t want his dancers to settle. Even when the New York City Ballet became very establishment in the ’60s, that was a moment of some crisis for him. Not just romantically, but also artistically, because being the establishment was not what he had ever been. It was dangerous. It’s a dangerous place artistically. You might lose your imaginative vitality, I think is how it felt to him.

Margaret Fuhrer:

I’m sorry to keep blowing through themes that you tease out over hundreds of pages in your book, but…

Jennifer Homans:

It’s okay!

Margaret Fuhrer:

There’s also death all over Balanchine’s life and all over his works. And that becomes one of the largest themes in this book, is how death shaped his perspective and how it seemed that some of his most profound art grew out of his greatest losses. Can you talk a little more about that?

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, that was something that I came to in the course of writing the book. I think I knew it when I started, and I think we probably all know it in a way, because all you have to do is see Serenade to know that. But the theme of it and the repetition and the number of dead bodies in the dances becomes then quite striking. And so that, I saw that as being part of the 20th century he lived through, because he did experience a lot of loss and a lot of death in his life, and a lot of illness. So, illnesses that he should have died from, like TB. He didn’t expect to live.

So, this theme of death and loss, both the theme of death in his ballets and the idea that loss itself can be a source of creative imagination, I think was just striking to me. Many of his greatest works, or at least some of his greatest works, come from moments of great loss. Like Agon coming immediately after Tanaquil Le Clercq’s experience being crippled with polio in 1956, and then Agon in 1957.

Another example was the failed and to him devastating love affair with Suzanne Farrell, and then the death of Stravinsky right after that. And almost immediately out of that…

Margaret Fuhrer:

Stravinsky Festival.

Jennifer Homans:

… a crashing depression, exactly, that he experienced comes the Stravinsky Festival. Those are just two examples of what I came to see as a life that was almost literally plagued with various kinds of physical ailment, illness. The whole question of exile and his family and the loneliness of the man. He was surrounded by people and deeply lonely.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Balanchine, it seems like he didn’t make it especially easy to write this biography because he was so uninterested in his own legacy, the documentation of anything, “Après moi, le board” and all of that. But there’s also been discussion about this in the context of Neil Baldwin’s recent biography of Martha Graham, who, of course, was even more hostile to biographers, burning her letters and so forth.

Obviously, those are two very different artists. But this ambivalence about biography and documentation, what do you think that’s about? Is it just another expression of the dance-world emphasis on the eternal? Again, I’m asking you to paraphrase your own writing here, but…

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, no, I do think there’s part of it that’s that. And I think, again, it follows closely on your question about the death and the theme of death because this idea of, “Now! What are you saving for? You might be dead tomorrow.” And he really knew that. He didn’t just say that. He knew that in his soul, in his gut. You might be dead tomorrow, so the eternal now was everything. It was really everything.

And I think as somebody who lost his homeland and lost his family in many ways—he didn’t see them for a long, long time after he left, when he was age 20, in 1924. He didn’t go back until 1962. His parents were both dead and his sister was dead. His brother was remaining, but he didn’t have a close family available to him or around him. So, I think the idea that it would go on was to him just, it wasn’t part of his life. He wasn’t going to be there. It wasn’t part of the eternal. That would be a different now. That would be somebody else’s now. He was very clear about it. “Not my dances. These will not be my dances.” His main idea was, “Those dancers trained by me, this music, now, now, now.”

And when that changes, the dances change. Because even as, he would say, “I leave for two months and it’s all different. You need me here all the time to make sure that you’re still awake and alive and doing the things that we are creating together.” And that’s the other part of it. The dances aren’t just George Balanchine’s, some text that is set in the sky or on a piece of paper or even in someone’s memory, because there are so many people and so many memories. It’s not a solid object. We know this about dance. It’s ephemeral. But we know it even more deeply in him because he was so committed to it and was not interested in archiving his dances. Except sometimes. But I think that he wanted the dances to live on only to the extent that they would help the people that he had worked with and loved. And otherwise, it’s not his problem.

Margaret Fuhrer:

On the other hand, on the other side of this equation, what myths did Balanchine help cultivate about himself? Because it seems like he was actually quite good at self-mythologizing.

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, I think the myths about himself were…that he didn’t at least contradict. Although, he said more than we remember now. I was struck by that. I listened to every interview that he gave that I could find. And there were a lot of them, and he talked quite a lot. But still, the myth does grow up around him, and he is part of it. I agree with you. I think that’s right, in the sense that he didn’t want to document it. He didn’t want to reveal himself. He didn’t really want to reveal himself. I started the book with this good comment that he made to somebody who was trying to write a biography of him. “He will never know. Nobody will ever know.”

So, the idea that he is somebody from whom dances just pour forth. This idea that he walks into the studio and it’s all done right there, right then in an interaction with the dancers, is only a half truth. Because he’s also worked for sometimes years on the score. And transcribing, transposing, reading, thinking, absorbing, ironing—doing all the things that he did that creative people do to allow their ideas to percolate and come forth.

And all of that was in his head, and he wasn’t sharing that with very many people. Even if he talked about in interviews saying how hard it was to do that, he never really told anyone how he did it or what he did. And he certainly didn’t tell the dancers. So, that idea, their experience was that he came in the room and it poured forth, or that, if there were hard moments that they all understood that they were a crucial part of it and part of the creative process. But still this idea that it was just easy somehow was not true. It wasn’t easy.

Margaret Fuhrer:

He’d been at home for years reading scores like novels in bed.

Jennifer Homans:

Yeah, exactly. There is a picture of him, I believe, of him sitting in bed with a score. This is how closely he was thinking musically.

Margaret Fuhrer:

I’m moving away from the book a bit now. But how do you feel now about the state of Balanchine’s legacy today, now that they are somebody else’s dances?

Jennifer Homans:

Look, I’m always hesitant to talk about that in any way, because in the book, I certainly am working on both a historical and narrative and a critical levels and layers, trying to interweave these layers. But the book ends in 1983, and the reason for that—and there is no epilogue—the reason for that is that he’s gone in 1983, and all I could do was say what he said about his legacy.

My job now, with a different hat, in a way, as a critic, is different. And I take it very seriously. And it’s not something that I usually talk about very much because it’s not history. It’s not long ago. It’s not something we have a perspective on. And in a way, I’m part of it. I’m trying to grapple with what is going on, and what are we? That’s like a moment-to-moment thing that I think has to happen in a conversation that’s actually in print, because otherwise, it’s just generalities that don’t mean anything or mean too much.

The only thing I could say is that I think that the dances, the Balanchine dances that we have, are—what I’m interested in seeing is what happens to them. It’s like all of us. I’m interested in seeing what happens to them, because they’re not Balanchine in the way they were in 1972 or in 1962 or ’52 or ’42. And they were different at each of those moments. So it’s natural that they would be different now. So, what is it that people today are trying to say through them?

Margaret Fuhrer:

How are they making that bed shape to their bodies?

Jennifer Homans:

How are they making that bed shape to their bodies! Right. That was his metaphor, and it’s a beautiful one, isn’t it?

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah. Well, you might not like my last question then either. In your previous book, Apollo’s Angels, a ballet history, you—now somewhat infamously—concluded by saying that ballet is dying. How soon after writing and thinking that did you begin working on Mr. B?

Jennifer Homans:

First of all, just let me clarify—just first, let me clarify. That last epilogue, there were a lot of people who read the epilogue and didn’t read the book! And that was upsetting to me. But what I was trying to say there was dance, not dance, but ballet, may be dying. Can it survive in the contemporary environment? The world is changing very quickly, and is not at all what it was like when I was studying dance even.

That was really the question. It’s a cultural question in a way. It’s not an accusation. It’s a cultural question.

And so, how did I think about that in terms of choosing Balanchine as a subject? It wasn’t really part of my thinking. I just was looking for the biggest subject I could think of. And I was also following the fact that I couldn’t get him out of my mind. So, I started working on the book two years after Apollo’s Angels was published.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Yeah, I guess I’m trying to get at something that I’m not articulating very well. But after taking this journey through Balanchine’s life, has that journey changed your feelings at all about ballet now or ballet’s future? I’m wondering, do you see in any of the artists working in ballet today, an heir to this legacy that and maybe in the decades immediately following Balanchine’s death was perhaps a bit too oppressive?

Jennifer Homans:

I suppose I don’t even see it…sometimes I wonder if it’s the right approach to be looking for the next person. And there are lots of next people and they’re working right now today. And so, lots of people didn’t like Balanchine when he was working early on. It’s hard. I guess, did it change the way I think about today, looking at his life? That’s a complicated question, even your formulation of it is complicated, as you said.

And I think maybe one way to put it briefly is that it made me feel that, he always said, “You’re not going to make a masterpiece every day, just keep making dances. Just keep going.” And he made dances constantly, and you don’t know when you’re going to hit the bullseye. You always hit the bullseye when you’re not looking at it. And so, I just don’t think there’s a way to… I’m not waiting. I feel like we don’t know what forms dance is going to take in the future. So, what forms does it take now, and what are the decisions people making now?

To me, it’s the old adage: When you go into the theater and you sit down—and I still feel this—you sit down in the audience and the lights go out and it’s very exciting. You don’t know what’s going to happen.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Here.

Jennifer Homans:

What’s going to happen now, here?

Margaret Fuhrer:

This theater.

Jennifer Homans:

Now.

Margaret Fuhrer:

These dancers.

Jennifer Homans:

Right now. I think that’s the way to live it and see it. So, I think he was right about that.

Margaret Fuhrer:

Well, Jennifer, thank you so much for making the time today. This is maybe an unusual thing to say about a biography of a well-known historical figure, but I really found Mr. B to be like a page-turner. It’s so vivid in its descriptions of Balanchine’s life and work process. So, thank you for the artistry that you brought to the task of biography.

Jennifer Homans:

Well, thank you. I did work hard on that part. I wanted it to be written in a way that would tell that story, because it’s an amazing story.

[pause]

One more big thank-you to Jennifer. Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century is out now from Random House; we have links in the show notes with information about where to find it.

And thanks to all of you for listening. We’ll be back next Thursday with a headline rundown episode, recapping all the top dance news stories—something we haven’t done for a few weeks now, so there’ll be a lot to talk about. Until then, keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.