All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine

Teachout begins his short biography of George Balanchine by describing his first, spellbound experience of watching a Balanchine ballet. He wrote this book, he explains, because it was what he wanted after seeing this unexpected performance. "Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this? And what kind of man made it?" were the thoughts running through his head. I had an identical experience when I first went to the NYCB, and this is exactly the book I wanted then. I wondered about the choreographer who had made ballet so modern, so unlike the frilly tutus and unrelenting prettiness of ballet as I thought I knew it. Teachout's moves rapidly through Balanchine's long life, but he manages to cover a lot of ground, from Mr. B's difficult childhood in Russia to his death from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, to the legacy of his dances. Teachout succeeds in describing what was fresh and important about Balanchine's dances in vocabulary an intelligent layman can understand, and although his admiration for his subject is obvious, he does not shy away from describing the more scandalous aspects of Balanchine's life. The art and the gossip both help Teachout describe the creative process of a twentieth-century legend.

Teachout's short biography of Balanchine has a lot more meat in it than I expected, considering that he makes a comment in the Preface that he wrote it for the casual ballet-goer or even someone who has never been to the ballet. He takes a casual but observant stroll through Balanchine's professional and personal lives and with telling incident and anecdote makes this giant of twentieth-century art come alive, warts and all. Further, his tone is one of kindliness and understanding, even when it comes to Balanchine's inveterate womanizing, without it becoming a work of hagiography. And he conveys in words how Balanchine filled his plotless ballets with "the most extraordinary encounters and events" and changed the face of modern ballet. I came to this book not as a balletomane but as a lover of the music of Stravinsky whose music, of course, was the aural life blood of Balanchine's art. I was not disappointed in that there were many glimpses of Stravinsky along the way. But more important Teachout's easy style and consummate story-telling ability made this a compulsive read. Many biographers lack that quality. Frankly I would recommend this book not only to the dance neophyte like me, but to any lover of ballet, or modern dance, or of twentieth century music. It certainly provides a beautifully written record of one of the high points of American culture of its era. Scott Morrison

I will make the inevitable comparison between this book and Robert Gottlieb's short biography of Balanchine. This book is my choice because Gottlieb's book, while businesslike, is a bit earthbound. Gottlieb's biography did not exude the spirit of dance for me. And the biographical facts, reported in brief by both Gottlieb and Teachout, have been given more scope in Bernard Taper's wonderful full length biography. In Teachout's favor, he is a dance critic, and he treats the dances themselves with more insight and depth. As a reader, I feel this added to the book's value. So the book I'll keep on my shelf is Terry Teachout's Balanchine.