Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine 

Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet:

What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences. The first was the trousers – the earthly man, delighted by sensual feelings and desires, who loved good food, fine wine, beautiful women… The cloud or breath was something else, and he saw it as the source of his gift.

This is also the central theme of her magnificent and gripping book, which walks a fine balance between explaining a life full of incident, of five marriages, other almost-wives, many affairs, disastrous betrayals and tragedy, and the wonder and spiritual abstraction of his work, which reshaped the image of ballet in the 20th century and beyond. 

It’s all there in her action-packed, minutely researched Mr B, which traces the life of Georgi Melitonovich Balanchivadze, born illegitimately in St Petersburg in 1904 but later certified as having been the offspring of legally wedded parents, to his death in a New York hospital on 30 April 1983 from Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease – which may or may not have been caused by one of the injections he took to preserve his virility.

Almost every step Balanchine took along that road was extraordinary, full of odd chances and extreme circumstances. It began on the day his mother abandoned him at St Petersburg’s Imperial Theatre School, the feeder for the Mariinsky Ballet, when he unexpectedly landed a place instead of his sister – ‘They just left me there… like you take a dog and leave it,’ he recorded bitterly – and continued through the revolution, which broke down the walls of the ordered ballet world which became his home.