December 6th: Jennifer Homans in conversation with Karole Armitage
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Jennifer Homans will discuss her new book Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century with Karole Armitage.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, December 6th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. If you have a question during the event, please email it to Evan@192Books.com.
Jennifer Homans — Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century
(Published by Random House, 2022)
Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century—The New York Times called him “the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in archives across Russia, Europe, and the Americas, Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary dances.
Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century. Born in Russia under the last czar, 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 marriages—all to dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises, and learn of his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the most glorious, strange, and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.
With full access to Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers, Jennifer Homans, the dance critic for The New Yorker and a former dancer herself, has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s 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.
Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for The New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed, bestselling Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, Homans danced professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.
Karole Armitage (Choreographer/Director) began her professional career in 1973 as a ballet dancer with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève in Switzerland during the period when George Balanchine served as the director. The company performed Balanchine repertoire exclusively including Agon, Serenade, La Valse, Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #2, Concerto Barocco and The Four Temperaments. Following her departure from Geneva, Armitage joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (1976-1981), then formed her own company, Armitage Gone! Dance, which went on hiatus in the 1990s while she served as Director of MaggioDanza, the Florence Ballet composed of 45 dancers, curated the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Dance and became resident choreographer for the Ballet de Lorraine in France. She is renowned for pushing boundaries to create contemporary works that blend the poetry and technical brilliance of ballet with conceptual ideas and techniques from modern dance. A hallmark of her work is collaboration. She frequently works with composers, scientists and visual artists including Jeff Koons, Karen Kilimnick, Brice Marden, David Salle and Philip Taaffe. Known as the “punk ballerina” Armitage’s work is at once both esoteric and popular. She has choreographed Broadway Productions, Videos for Madonna and Michael Jackson, several films for Merchant Ivory productions, a show for Cirque du Soleil and the Fall/Winter 2020/2021 Marc Jacobs Fashion show. In addition to creating over 100 works for her dance company, Armitage has directed operas and created new dance productions for major houses in the US and Europe. She was honored with an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Kansas University in 2013, with a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University in 2016 to study Native American Plains Culture and is an MIT Media Lab Directors Fellow.