Jennifer Homans on 20th-century choreographer George Balanchine, in conversation with Dame Hermione Lee; Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College. A joint DANSOX and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing event, 24th November, 2022 – Maggie Watson reports

On Thursday 24th November, DANSOX and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing presented a joint event in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. DANSOX director Professor emeritus Sue Jones introduced the Centre’s founder, Dame Hermione Lee, who interviewed writer, academic, and former dancer Jennifer Homans about her biography Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century.

Homans had spent ten years working on the book: in 2017 at the Dancing Lives conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, she spoke of her quest to explore Balanchine’s work with a view revealing the man himself through the dances that he created. Five years on, this was an opportunity to discover more about that process and about how Homans had addressed the problems that she had encountered.

 

DANSOX presents Jennifer Homans & Dame Hermione Lee in conversation on ‘Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century’, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, 24th November 2022

DANSOX joins forces with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing to present two distinguished scholars in conversation, Jennifer Homans and Professor Dame Hermione Lee, launching Jennifer Homans’ important new biography, Mr B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century. An unmissable discussion of one of ballet’s most influential figures.

George Balanchine did for dance what Picasso did for painting: he changed the art and the way we see the human form. Homans follows Balanchine from his childhood in Tsarist St Petersburg, through the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, and the cultural Cold War, to New York, where he co-founded and ran the New York City Ballet.

• Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for the New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet was a bestseller and named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, she performed 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.
• Hermione Lee is a biographer and Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University.

Date: Thursday 24th November, 5.30pm

Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Followed by drinks reception; free and open to all.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/jennifer-homans-on-20th-century-choreographer-george-balanchine-tickets-440915097927

Find out more and purchase Jennifer Homans’ book here

Read Maggie Watson’s account for Oxford Dance Writers of the 2017 DANSOX and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing collaborative event which also featured Jennifer Homans here

 

Ida Rubinstein: The Final Act. Playground Theatre, London, matinée performance 9th October 2021 – Maggie Watson reviews

The play opens with a projected image of Ida Rubinstein’s grave, which morphs into mysterious and exotic visions of Naomi Sorkin, who slowly unwinds and removes one veil after another.  She is at once Cléopâtre, Salomé and Rubinstein, gradually revealing her body, as she prepares to disclose layer upon layer of her past.  Sorkin’s compelling performance exudes magnetic power, as she plays an ageing femme fatale telling her life story to journalist Edward Clement (played by Max Wilson). 

 

The Arts of the Theatre: performance, discussion and demonstration of a rediscovered experimental study by Ninette de Valois; 12 May 2021, Zoom from Royal Ballet School – Maggie Watson reports

It was great delight to attend the Royal Ballet School’s recreation of Ninette de Valois’ experimental study The Arts of the Theatre (1925) to the music of Ravel’s La Valse.  It was the culmination of a project resulting from archivist Anna Meadmore’s exciting discovery of Ursula Moreton’s choreographic notations in the School’s collections.

The evening fell into four parts:  an illustrated talk by Meadmore, followed by an initial performance of the work by five dancers from the Upper School.  Then, after a brief pause, Meadmore interviewed each of the young dancers, sensitively eliciting their individual responses to the work, and taking questions from the online audience.  Finally the dancers danced again, giving us all a second chance to watch a work that had not been performed since 1932.

 

Mark Franko: The Fascist Turn in The Dance of Serge Lifar: Interwar French Ballet and the German Occupation – Sue Ash reviews

During the fascinating discussion between Professor Susan Jones and Professor Mark Franko, in celebration of the publication of this book, held for DANSOX members via Zoom in November 2020,[1] Franko says: “I worry that the Occupation chapter is overpowering the book”, because the critical responses received thus far, had only written about that chapter. I will attempt to review more of Franko’s tour de force than this chapter, although it is rich with new archival material which uncovers much about the relationship between Serge Lifar at the Paris Opera and the Nazi Occupation.

Franko runs the major theme of the baroque in neoclassicism in ballet, through the body of Serge Lifar, throughout his book. He dissects the French baroque of the seventeenth century and the German baroque of the eighteenth century, their similarities and differences, their nationalist links and how they are reflected in Lifar’s ballets at different stages of Lifar’s career in Paris (1929-1958).

 

Marius Petipa: the emperor’s ballet master, by Nadine Meisner – Maggie Watson reviews

Marius Petipa worked for the Russian Imperial Theatres as dancer and ballet master for sixty-three years, from 1847 until his death in 1910. He choreographed over fifty original ballets, creating works with composers who ranged from Pugni, Minkus and Drigo to Tchaikovsky and Glazunov, for some of the greatest dancers of the nineteenth century. His influence on ballet is incalculable, yet Nadine Meisner’s meticulously researched biography is the first coherent, full length, account of his life.

Meisner’s eagerly anticipated book was launched in the UK in June at the DANSOX summer school at St Hilda’s College Oxford, and it does not disappoint.

 

Serge Lifar and the Interwar Dance Discourses of Neoclassicism (1930-39); Professor Mark Franko DANSOX guest seminar, 2nd June 2017

Following on from his fascinating presentation for DANSOX in 2015 on The Fascist Legs of Serge Lifar, internationally renowned dance scholar Professor Mark Franko of Temple University USA returns to St Hilda’s College to deliver a guest seminar which will examine how neoclassicism was theorized in French ballet during the 1930s.  Don’t miss this opportunity to hear about the further development of Professor Franko’s thought provoking research.

Date:  Friday 2nd June 5.30-7.00pm

Venue:  Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Tickets:  This event is free and open to all and will be followed by refreshments.  However please book online here

Find out more about Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) and its ongoing programme here

Read Susanna Reece’s report for Oxford Dance Writers of Professor Franko’s talk on The Fascist Legs of Serge Lifar here

 

Balanchine and the lost muse, by Elizabeth Kendall – Maggie Watson reviews

Lidia Ivanova’s death in a boating ‘accident’ in 1924 remains one of ballet history’s unexplained mysteries, but she did not disappear without trace. Elizabeth Kendall’s meticulously researched book does not solve the puzzle of how or why she died, but she does lift this remarkable dancer out of her shadowy existence as a tragic footnote in her contemporaries’ memoirs and place her centre stage.

A friend and rival of Alexandra Danilova at the Imperial Ballet School, Ivanova had early success of one kind or another both on stage and off. Danilova’s memoir notes that Ivanova was expected to inherit the roles of ballerina Elena Smirnova; Tamara Geva’s that Ivanova was rumoured to be on ‘intimate terms with some shady government official’ and that she was said to be ‘close to all the Communist biggies’.