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.

 

La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern, by Lynn Garafola – Maggie Watson reviews

Lynn Garafola’s biography of Bronislava Nijinska sets her life and work in the context of the cultural and political changes that shaped the twentieth century.  Chiefly remembered in the United Kingdom as Vaslav Nijinsky’s sister, and the choreographer of just two works, Les Biches and Les Noces, this book resituates Nijinska as a huge creative force, whose influence has had a seminal impact on ballet throughout the Western world.

Garafola’s sixteen chapters brilliantly knit together Nijinska’s personal and professional life, revealing a complex and troubled woman who was truly driven to create dances.  There was continually tension both between Nijinska’s compulsion to work and her desire to look after her dearly loved family, and between her professional achievements and her tragic personal life, which included her brother’s decline into mental illness, the death of her son in a car crash and her unconsummated love for the singer Fedor Chaliapin.

 

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.