(352) Jennifer Homans, Author and Dance Historian, LIVE from the Vail Dance Festival
Photo by Christopher Duggan
Author Jennifer Homans first made her mark ten years ago with the release of 'Apollo's Angels', an exhaustive work tracing ballet's roots from the Renaissance to modern times. Now she's back with a new release, 'Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century', following the choreographer's life and work in one of the most comprehensive ways ever committed to the page. Homans sits down to with the hosts of the podcast 'Conversations On Dance' to talk about the research she did over the course of a decade of writing, what her most surprising finds were, and what her ultimate takeaways were from getting to know the life of one of the 20th century's artistic greats in a way few writers ever have.
This episode was recorded live on Saturday July 29th, 2023 at the Gerald R Ford Amphitheater. Conversations on Dance at the Vail Dance Festival is generously underwritten by the Town of Vail.
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically. It’s accuracy may vary.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:00:14]:
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for joining us here at the Vale Dance Festival for Conversations on Dance. My name is Michael Sean Breeden.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:00:29]:
And I'm Rebecca King Ferraro and we're happy to be here this year. I'm happy to be back, yes, sitting next to Michael.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:00:35]:
We've been co hosting the podcast Conversations on Dance for the past seven years and it is our deepest pleasure to come out here to the Vale Dance Festival and get to let the audience have a deeper look into the artists of the festival. And then today we have well, we have this beautiful music in the back, but we are joined by an incredible author, Jennifer Homans, who wrote one of the most important books of the decade, in my opinion, about dance, mr. B, that came out last year. And we just can't wait to dive in and hear all about this incredible book.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:01:07]:
Thank you for joining us and thank.
Jennifer Homans [00:01:08]:
You so much for having me.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:01:11]:
So Jennifer, we would love to hear, before we get into the book and your own writing a little bit about your own experience as a dancer. What was your early training like and your relationship to ballet?
Jennifer Homans [00:01:24]:
My early training was so influenced by Balanchine and by the School of American Ballet because I had had a little bit of training as a child. And then when I was about 16, I was sort of dropped into the world of George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. This was in the late seventy s. And I remember going for my audition and I walked in, I was sort of a kid from the Midwest and the whole thing happened in Russian and I was a little shocked. And then I found out that many of the teachers at the school were Russians who had been born at the turn of the century. And sometimes they would stop class and they would say, okay, that's enough with doing. Now we're going to sit and we're going to tell you stories. And they would tell us all about Paris in the, about leaving during the revolution. It was already sort of starting. This whole history was coming towards me from the very start.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:02:26]:
Who were some of those teachers that.
Jennifer Homans [00:02:27]:
Would tell you like Danilova Dubrovska especially? Those were the two main ones that would do that, but sometimes chomkovsky a little bit. I mean, Krambrevsky loved to talk about his life.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:02:40]:
That's so interesting because Michael and I talk sometimes when we are teaching, that sometimes students are just like we're doing an Arabs to do an Arabesque. That's what our teacher told us. There's not that context behind it. And a lot of teachers don't offer that to their students sometimes. So I love hearing that they're giving you this rich history, this understanding of it's not just, we put our hand on the bar, we do our plies. It's so much more than that. And so I wonder what that sparked in you to investigate more about the art form.
Jennifer Homans [00:03:07]:
I mean, I think the whole thing fascinated me so much, and also just the whole nature of ballet. And then, what is this strange art where people turn out their feet and do these things that are so demanding? So I wanted to try to figure that out. And I was sort of that person who I came from a very academic background, so I was always walking across the street during the time off from classes to go to the New York Public Library, and I was just reading all of these books. And then at night, I would be at the theater watching these Balanchine ballets. I mean, every night we would sneak in some way or another, drop the ticket down, and ten of us would go in on one ticket, that kind of thing. But they didn't care. They knew we were doing it. It was part of our education. And it was just such an overwhelming experience for me to see these works and these dancers. It just never left me. My whole life, I've been trying to figure out what happened in those years and who Balanchine was and what it was all about.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:04:14]:
Did you have any personal interaction with Balanchine, or did you sort of see him as a figure?
Jennifer Homans [00:04:19]:
Know, I was lucky. I mean, who knew at the time that I would then embark on this decade long project to try to write a book about him? But he was around. I took his class, I met him briefly, I watched him rehearse. I was an extra in some of the dances he set because they would bring in students from the School of American Ballet, and even in Adagio La Mantoso, one of his later works in 1981, which was really a sort of staging of his own death. It was a remarkable thing to be a part of because it was only performed once. So I did have a taste. I knew what his physique was like. I knew how he presented himself. I knew how he was in a room with dancers. So that helped me a lot.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:05:09]:
And saw so many of these important.
Jennifer Homans [00:05:11]:
Dancers, too, and saw so many important dancers and worked with Suzanne Farrell and Maria Tallchief and lots of people that had been deep parts of his lives, more than I knew at the time.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:05:24]:
So when did academia start to pull a little bit harder than the ballet world for you?
Jennifer Homans [00:05:30]:
Well, I danced professionally for, I don't know, somewhere between eight and ten years. And then I had an injury, like so many of us, and I found myself at home reading a lot of books. And I thought, this is actually kind of good. And I sort of knew I would always end up making a transition. I was in my late twenty s. I decided this was the time to stop. So I actually got back in shape so that I knew I could do it. And then I decided I would go to college, which I had never done. Like so many of us, we start so young. And so I went to Columbia as.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:06:16]:
A professional dancer because you had such this analytical mind and you were so interested in the history. I know some of us take notes, some of us do this research, go to the library. What were those kinds of things that you did outside of the studio to prepare yourself for different roles that you would dance?
Jennifer Homans [00:06:31]:
Well, you know, there were two things, I suppose, if I think about it. One is I started really once Dubrovska sat us down and started talking, I was sort of always asking her questions, and I would go to Danilova's house for tea and ask her questions. Unfortunately, I did not tape or write those down. And then they would say things like, Danila. I remember her walking into the studio one afternoon while I was taking probably my third class of the day, and she said, put on your clothes and go to the Met. You've done enough dancing for today. And so I did. There was sort of permission to look at culture broadly and not to be so focused on, can I do this? And how am I going to train my body to do three pirouettes instead of two? And so this whole Russian background gave it a context that was sort of interesting from the start and I think sort of spurred a lot of my curiosity about it.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:07:36]:
So what were some of your first writings about dance? What was inspiring you in the beginning and what were some of your early writings?
Jennifer Homans [00:07:44]:
Know, my early writings about dance had to do with I then went to NYU and did a PhD in Modern European History. And I thought I would leave it all behind. I mean, this was part of my long walk away from dance and then my quick run back, and I just realized people said to me, there's no archives for that. And I thought they were right. You can't do a history of dance. You can't write about dance because there's no text. And it's performed once and it's lost, and there's these efforts at notation, but they don't really give us a record. So what exactly are you writing the history of? And then I thought, Well, I'm going to go find out. So I went to Paris and I went to a couple of other archives. I went to some archives and I started really digging around and I found out, you know what? You can do this. And I tried to sort of figure out how I was going to do it. And that started the process of me trying to write about dance. I started writing about criticism while I was working on the PhD. And that was kind of an accident of meeting someone. But it was sort of natural for me in a way, because I had for years been, even as a dancer, been bringing my notebook into the theater when I would watch dance, because I found that if I wrote it down, I wasn't doing anything with it. I was just writing it down for myself. Then I knew what I thought about it. I couldn't figure it out. Somehow the jump between this word of doing and action and the world of words was something I needed to make.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:09:24]:
What were some of those notes that you would write? Would it be your thoughts, or would you be saying, oh, this particular step was right, or this part of the choreography?
Jennifer Homans [00:09:32]:
I mean, as a dancer, I was always looking for that, but I was also trying to figure out not so much, what is this about? But I gradually came to see that dance is also a form of ideas. It's a history of ideas as much as it is of dances. So that behind or within? Not behind, within, really, a dance, there are ideas. They do it this way, not that way. They choose this music, not that music. They choose that set, not this one. Why? So then I started to sort of see that this world on stage was almost like a little human society, and you could watch it, and you could sort of try to figure out what were they doing, what did they believe in, why did they make those choices? Or at least you could try, right?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:10:27]:
I find it a little amusing that you were saying your initial impression was that dance history couldn't be written about successfully. And then you decide that for your first book, you're going to go write, like, the most comprehensive dance history book of all time. So that's a pretty big leap. But let's talk about what took you there. How did the idea for Apollo's Angels come about? And what were some of your first steps? Or did it happen over time? What was that process, exactly what you.
Jennifer Homans [00:10:55]:
Said it happened over time. I mean, it grew out of a sort of long study that I was doing, actually for the dissertation on French ballet around the Revolution and the Romantic period. And I thought, okay, well, when I finish it, I'll publish it as a book the way people do when they're in academia. And then somebody said to me, well, that's a little specialized. I mean, can you do something a little broader than that? And I said, oh, sure, why don't we just do the whole thing? And I thought maybe like, six months for the Renaissance. Six months. I plotted it all out a couple of years, and then twelve years later, it was obviously a gross misunderstanding of the depth of these historical moments. Right?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:11:45]:
What was some of the research that you did once you decided you're like, okay, I'm going to tackle it? How did you kind of start going about putting all of this together, all those angels?
Jennifer Homans [00:11:54]:
I did it step by step. I mean place, by know, like in chunks. So Renaissance Italy, Louis XIV in France, and for each time period, I did a whole volume of research in archives. And then also with people. For example, during the Louis Coutures period, I worked with French dance who had tried to reconstruct some of these dances to learn what they had learned from the notation that existed at that time, the foyer notation. And, you know, it was a kind of mixture. And then sometimes in later periods where there was notation, I found all of these scribblings that choreographers would make to keep their own notes written down, classes, things that were very they were great sources. So I actually went into the studio and I tried to put those together myself. I hired a violinist. What was the music like? Because I had a musical score to go with it, so I was able to get a sense of what these dances were like then from the sources of the time, which was really interesting to do.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:13:15]:
Right. In my head, I'm kind of likening what it's like for you to write a book to maybe the process of what it's like for me to stage a ballet. There are parts that I know will go quickly and that I'll enjoy, and then other parts that are there's a density or something that I don't want to tackle. What would that be like for you? Are there parts of history that are just the recordings are not available, or archives are not as strong as there are for other things? Were there parts that you were kind of like, oh, I'm dreading this moment, but it's important to the book?
Jennifer Homans [00:13:50]:
Yeah, I didn't anticipate what they would be. In fact, some of the moments that I thought were going to be the strongest were the hardest. Like Nover. Nover. There's great sources. I was sort of, well, I've got great sources for each part. I would also be reading a lot of history because it really is a history book. So politics, culture, everything that was going on at the time, how people have approached that moment in the past, what does it stand for? What were people trying to achieve? And the moments that were difficult were really, in a way, writing problems for me, and I didn't encounter them until I got to the actual moment of writing. I had tons of research pages and thousands of pages of research. And then where does that fit in the argument? What is it telling know? Like with Nover, the Russians were hard too. The soviet period because it's so fraught politically how to talk about dance. And there were people still living that I was interviewing who had been through that period. I went to Russia and interviewed dancers who had been active in the Soviet period, but then their testimony is questionable, so you have to be careful because you don't know what they're trying why are they telling you that?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:15:12]:
Right.
Jennifer Homans [00:15:13]:
What do they want to convey about a period that was from Westernized not so great choreographically anyway? Dancers everybody recognizes were great. So there was a way in which that was very tricky to and I ended up doing a lot of research and talking to a lot of people. And it was important to go there and really be in the studio with these people right. As well as reading about them. Yeah.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:15:44]:
This is a question also for Mr. B that we wanted to bring into this. But as we know, dance can be opinionated, and they maybe have a different version of events, like you're mentioning here. So how do you kind of dig through what can be gossip and then what can be the truth and kind of meet somewhere in the middle?
Jennifer Homans [00:16:02]:
The main way that I did that was by just learning by the volume of information. So if a story was coming through and I was kind of like, I would make sure I had it three times from three different people, or that I had it from other sources, like archival sources as well, that I could piece it together. As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I had a pretty good nose for what was being told. And then the other interesting thing is that gossip is a source. Gossip is definitely a source because it shapes what happens.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:16:40]:
That's true.
Jennifer Homans [00:16:41]:
People gossip. They think they know what happened. A story goes out there. Did Suzanne sleep with Mr. B or didn't Farrell?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:16:52]:
Right.
Jennifer Homans [00:16:52]:
You know, these sorts of things, these were like high gossip. So, you know, why do people care so much? Well, that becomes the question. And then you're trying to sort of sort through the story, but also the stories about the story. So there's a kind of layering of effect that has to be also captured in the writing, because in the end, the reality that we all create for ourselves is partly fictional. So how you navigate that landscape is quite complex. And yet I didn't want to I decided not to bring the reader into that, necessarily, but to present it as a story with some complexity implied. But I wasn't going to do a meta where there's all these layers that everybody has to sort through. I wanted it to read like a novel as much as I could.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:17:51]:
And it does.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:17:52]:
Yeah. Before we move on to Mr. B completely, I want to just talk a little bit about the epilogue of Apollo's Angels, which I'm sure maybe you're a little sick of hearing this question before. Yeah, never, ever. But the book finishes with this epilogue, discussing the potential future of ballet or issues with the future of ballet. And it was certainly a hot button topic of discussion. I'm wondering, did that surprise you in the time of its release and then now, 13 years later? So how do you feel about the epilogue?
Jennifer Homans [00:18:24]:
It did surprise me. I wasn't expecting it because I suppose I'm almost never expecting the responses that come because when I'm writing, I'm really not thinking about you or you. I'm really not. I actually have a kind of relationship with my computer or with myself or with the subjects that I've been living with. I mean, writing a book like Apollo's Angels is like living with all this whole world of people that are dead. But they populate my mind for most of the day. So I'm in conversation with them and less with, I learned, because even as a critic, you have to like, I'm doing this because my late husband once said to me, would you get all those people off your shoulder? Just take them off your shoulder because they're going to ruin your writing. So other critics, other this, the person you care most, what they think about your writing, you just got to get them off your shoulder and then be true to the subject. Of course, it doesn't always work, but mostly it did. Now, the epilogue, once it kind of raised a little bit of a tempest in a teapot, if you will. I mean, I wasn't sorry. Isn't it good to create a little bit of a conversation? The idea that this art form has certain ideas behind it, including a sort of decade long, at least sort of monastic training, in a way, and an art form that is fully embodied at a time when the world is moving towards a more virtual life in a more virtual entertainment realm. That just the vast changes that were happening across society and across culture seemed to me to be valid points of inquiry as to how is this going to go? And the question of race, lots of things that the ballet world in particular needed to sort of look at. And I wasn't like, scolding anyone. I was just saying, like, look what this is and look where we are as a culture. What do you think?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:20:43]:
Right?
Jennifer Homans [00:20:44]:
What do you think? Is this going to keep going? Are people going to be interested? You do have to talk to the audience, right?
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:20:55]:
I bet it really changed the way that people, decision makers within the industry were thinking. They were like, we have the responsibility now to move it forward.
Jennifer Homans [00:21:05]:
Maybe, I don't know, but I'm a historian. I just go back to my office and do my next project. But for me, that was a question I had, and so that's why I put it in there and it seemed to me. I was glad when people were discussing it. I think there's been a lot of reasons for change in the dance world in the last decade, and you've covered a lot of that in your podcast, and so I wouldn't want to claim that my book did that. And the other thing is that it's part of this closed culture that the dance world can sometimes and the ballet world in particular can sometimes be a part of. And people in other fields, in art, in literature, in theater, were asking this kind of question about their own art forms. It's not an insult, if anything. I mean, I've spent my life on these things, so I didn't think of it as an insult to people. It was really out of admiration and love. Yeah.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:22:16]:
Let's shift then, to going into your office, to finding your next subject. Did you have this idea about writing a book about Balanchine while you were writing Apollo's Angels, or did you take some breathing time? How did we get into the next book?
Jennifer Homans [00:22:35]:
Well, it was a natural next subject, number one. Right? It was, and I was a little intimidated by it. Could I do it? I wasn't sure. So I sat there for a while thinking about that. It was sort of the presence that was in my life because of the things that we were talking about earlier, about my own training. And most of the work that I performed professionally was Balanchine's work. There were other things, too, but that was the most remarkable to me. So it was a natural mean. All books are personal, too, in a way, and not to sort of overshare, as they say, but I was in a very difficult moment in my own life. I had had a lot of loss, and I didn't know what kind of writing was king to come out of that. And so I found myself drawn to Balanchine because I had a kind of instinct, I think, that there was a lot of loss in his life and in his dances. I found myself going to something like know, for a certain kind of okay. And so I was drawn to him, I think, for reasons that were also reasons that were in my life, both in my past, but also in that present moment that I didn't know really what those reasons were until maybe seven or eight years later into the research for the book, when I was discovering more and more about his life that I didn't know.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:24:16]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:24:17]:
I was wondering, while you were speaking about all the research that you did for Apollo's Angels, and we've also recently talked to you about how much then, of course, you did for this book. Was there any overlap? I'm sure you don't get rid of any of those notes that you take. They're probably where are they stored somewhere?
Jennifer Homans [00:24:30]:
Yeah, big file cabinet.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:24:32]:
So was there overlap? Did you go back and did you take a look at some of that?
Jennifer Homans [00:24:39]:
You know, the hardest parts of Mr. B to write were the parts that did overlap, because once you've written something, it's really hard to write it know, it's like set. And so how do you use that? Like the diagolev period, for example. There's a lot on diagleov in Apollo's Angels. How do I get that out without just like sort of cutting and the I don't need that, but I need a lot of that information, but, oh my God, am I going to write that again? That's exhausting. I can't imagine doing that. I see another biographer nodding her head. It's just very hard to go over old territory and make it fresh.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:25:24]:
Did you feel like approaching it maybe from a different perspective, maybe gave you a different look?
Jennifer Homans [00:25:29]:
Yeah, it was a different perspective, but it was also one of those areas that we were talking about earlier where it was a hard moment because the sources were thin. Surprisingly, there's a lot of sources about diagolev, but Balanchine, and know, one of the things about Balanchine is that he basically didn't keep anything. And even when Lincoln Kirstein met him at this moment in his life, during this whole period of diagolev, in this interwar European period, he said, the man has no reviews, he has no documents, he has nothing. He was stateless, he has nothing, he keeps nothing, he doesn't care about the past. So there was a way in which he had all but erased it. And the dance from that time are mostly lost and forgotten. So you've got a few reviews, some pictures. It's tough to reconstruct it all from that, right?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:26:27]:
I want to talk for a second about something I think the book does so successfully that to my mind hadn't been done so much before, which is discussion of Balanchine as a man. It's very easy to get caught up in a sort of mythology about Balanchine, and certainly that's something that I loved growing up, like romanticizing this ideal of this genius. But I found it completely fascinating and it deepened my appreciation of his genius. To know how the man made this work in particular, I think you set up so well his childhood kind of against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. And it wasn't something that I had ever thought of. When Balanchine would say, like, oh, when I was your age, I ate rats or whatever, it sounded something like we used to walk 12 miles in the snow. But you make it so viscerally real and you understand that that shaped everything of who he was going to be and how he was going to create from there on. Was that like a specific goal you had or just sort of how the book ended up taking shape?
Jennifer Homans [00:27:34]:
I think when I first started the book, I said to somebody, I'm just not sure about the organization. And he said, well, biography is easy because you start at the beginning and you end at the end. So I did that. I started at the beginning, and I started with the early life, and I knew the later life better, and I knew a lot of those dance better. So I started to see things as I was studying the early life. And then it became clear to me that there was this paradox in his early life, that he had grown up, born in 1904, under in the imperial system at the theater school, the Tsars Theater School, as a young child and living a kind of fantasy of imperial Russia, the courtly fantasy of it. And there are many reasons for that, including the fact that his mother happened to win the lottery just before he was born. So he was born rich, even though the family was not rich. So there's a carriage with a white horse and servants and people making so there was this like a kind of fantasy imperial world. And then there was a revolution, which I mean, he was very young when the First World War and the revolution and the civil wars began, and the violence of that period and the trauma that he went through, the illness, the spitting blood. We've talked about this, the pus filled sores on his body, the starvation. And this didn't go on for just a couple of months. We're talking years. And so there's that. And then there's the incredible inspiration of the artistic moment, which is what drives him. He leaves that imperial world. He was not a classical choreographer in that sense. He goes back to it, he uses it, but it's destroyed in the revolution for him, and he wants to be progressive and avant garde and to take things in a new direction. And there's all kinds of stuff happening, everything from acrobatics and nude dances to dances without story. It's a huge period of experimentation, as we all know, in theater, in art, in dance, in music. And he's part of that. So he takes those two things out of Russia, and as you say, we see that kind of informing the rest of his life, this pull towards this classical ideal in some ways, but it's destroyed. He has to start over. So he starts over with this body that's new and how is he going to make it? And that's what he's doing the rest of his life. How is he going to make it? Interesting.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:30:37]:
I find it's interesting, this concept of starting at the beginning. It, of course, makes sense, but I can see why you would be tempted to kind of start with the things you're more familiar with as a dancer. And so I wonder, since you did then go that route of starting really early, going through all this part of his life, how did that shape and change what you started to relearn kind of about his later life and the ballet that. You had dance?
Jennifer Homans [00:31:00]:
Yeah, it's such a good question because of course, that is what happens. I had these timelines and these theme lines and these like the marriages lines, love and illness lines, just like all over my study, because I was trying to keep track. It's different to write a whole book than to write an essay, which I had done quite a lot of. And this was the Rick challenge. How are you going to develop these characters over time given but within factual parameters? They're not fictional characters. Stuff happened and we need footnotes and we need sources, and you can't make it up, but the connections and the ways in which a person's psyche and their inner life and for Balanchine, of course, it's crucial because the inner life of the imagination is the world of the art. So understanding what was inside, as well as what happened in 19 this and 19 that was really the primary. And I did that in some ways through a lot of things, through interviews, through what happened, but also through the dances, without being very careful not to be reductive. Like the life makes the dances or the dancers make the life. It wasn't like that. Right. So it was my effort to bring all that together. Right.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:32:32]:
Something else that I think makes the book really special. Not everyone who writes about dance has experienced dance for themselves. And you obviously were a dancer. You had dance Balanchine's ballets. And a friend of mine, who's a former dancer, now writer, she pointed this out. She was know I've never read until Jennifer's writing something that could properly explain what Balanchine ballet make you feel. The non dancer audience, they need to understand why people were willing to give up things or why they did what they did. And you, having experienced some of that for yourself, enables you to communicate that in a really rich, obvious way. And I think that was something that as soon as she said that, I was like that's. What makes sense here is that we understand a little bit more deeply rather than just like, these people seem crazy. Is this a cult? Why are you you don't make money and you're in a windowless theater. Why would you do that? But then you do delve into what the dancers were experiencing. That made it such a wonderful time for them.
Jennifer Homans [00:33:35]:
Yeah, I ended up talking to a lot more dancers than I thought I would at first. I thought, oh, this is going to be very archival because I'm a historian and they've all written memoirs, or not all, but many, but in the end, I ended up talking to a lot of people, and many of them many times, because I was learning so much from them. And that is one of the things that I was learning from them. I learned it from my own experience, certainly. So I had an instinct for it, that these dance are amazing to dance. And I always say, not every night, but the coordination of the music and the body and the technique and the group, it's an extraordinary, and in my experience, unparalleled. Balanchine's work is like no one else's that I know of, in the ways in which you mean you truly are free for those moments. And there's a way in which it's so powerful to do that, as you say. And I talk to a lot, especially of women who had some more difficult experiences in particular, men did too, but women in particular, with Balanchine and with giving that giving up their 1617, 1819. I mean, they're young and sort of giving up everything to do this. That's what they would say. Do you know what it's like? We wanted to dance more than anything. That's really what we wanted. One of them even said to me, it's sex without sex. I think it's more than that, even, is what she was trying to tell of. There can be a kind of transcendence to it. And they were aiming that high. I mean, as Balanchine himself would know, what we're doing is a little bit something a little bit different. It's a little bit more than ordinary life. He was interested in extraordinary life, in that whole realer than real world of the stage, so that it's not the mundane, it's not pedestrian. They're like working to make themselves into creatures, beings that are a little bit different. He liked to call it the fourth dimension. A lot of people were talking like that at the time. Yeah.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:36:10]:
Makes me tear up a little bit. Even hearing you talking about dancing his ballet, it's just so true. There's been a lot of conversation recently surrounding the topic of balancing, and it was maybe like a religious experience, and maybe he was the god of that church or that religion. And so I wonder kind of what your takeaway is on that topic.
Jennifer Homans [00:36:31]:
Yeah, that's interesting, because of course, the next part of your sentence is, was it a cult? And there is something cultish about it at moments, but more in terms of its practices than in terms of it was never a cult because it was never organized around the personality of a single human being. It was not that. It was a question of service. And they were all in service to this art. And many people did say it was like a religion. And I think what they meant by that is that it was in some ways selfless, and a way of really transcending the self, so that you were all working together as a community.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:37:26]:
Through.
Jennifer Homans [00:37:27]:
The work that he was doing with them. Not like him standing there, you do this, you do that. No, he controlled the whole thing, yes, but there was a lot of freedom and a lot of back and forth. He gave people a lot of rope, and especially dancers, he would insist, and he was right. I can't make dances without dancers. And it wasn't that he walked into the room and had no other ideas in his head, and the whole thing poured out of him. He had studied the score like the very accomplished musician that he was, and he knew that score inside out, he would make we have them, we have his transcriptions, piano transcriptions of scores. And this part was a little secret. He didn't share that with the dancers. But when he got into the studio, it's not like the steps were there. They were king those together. So that there's a way in which the whole thing is a large community. Dancers, designers, lighting people, stage hands, costumers. He built an institution around him in order to be able to make these dances. And the institution was kind of anarchic. Oh, you know how to do that good. You go do that. You go do that. And then he would only get involved if he didn't like what was happening. But everybody had a lot the wheels were all turning. It wasn't one giant machine at all. So it's an interesting thing, and I think the religious aspect of it comes from both his deep religiosity. He was a very religious man, almost, I came to believe, a mystic himself because he was, as Lincoln Kirstein said, a kind of amateur theologian. He read mysticism, he read Sufism. He knew the Bible inside out. He was, as he always put it, in service to God. I was put here by God, and that's what we're doing. He really, really believed that, I think. And so he was humble, even though he knew he had a gift. But the gift wasn't him. The gift was from a higher source. So he managed to suffuse the entire theater with that feeling. And not that there weren't pettiness arguments, cruelties people doing what people do, fighting. And he could be mean, really mean. Cruel, even. But overall, when the curtain went up, that's what they were there for, right?
Michael Sean Breeden [00:40:29]:
Yeah. People are writing articles not just about this religious component, but more broader things that are like, is balance sheet problematic? Can we still do his ballet? That sort of thing. And your book is often cited, and in some ways, I'll often be like, did you guys read the same book as me? That's not my take. I'm kind of just curious what your thought is on those sorts of discussions that are going on now and how you feel, maybe about the way that people can just interpret your work in their own way, in a way that maybe you didn't intend the same thing with the epilogue. I'm sure you weren't intending to cause waves, but there we were. How do you feel about I mean.
Jennifer Homans [00:41:13]:
I guess the way I feel about all of this, and I don't follow all of those conversations, but I am certainly aware of what you're talking about. If we wanted to negotiate any one of those. We'd have to, I think, pull out the details and be very specific because general conversations can be just not very clear. Right, so my approach in the book really was to lay it out. I'm a historian. It's not that I didn't have opinions, of course, but I was not interested in playing the role of judge, I was interested in saying what happened and in trying to understand, as we were talking about earlier, the scope of the life, the reasons, not even the reasons, but the facts of his behavior. I mean, the human animal is a strange and difficult thing. I don't think anybody would disagree with that, and I wasn't interested. And I think it's a bit anachronistic as well to impose a sort of sense of some of the conversations and interests that people have today in purity and in the ways in which behavior can be behavior of an individual or of an artist can then somehow be used to cancel their art, if we're being direct. Right. Which I think is what you're talking about.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:42:42]:
Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Homans [00:42:42]:
And that's not my business. If people want to do that, that's them now doing what they're doing. And to me, it's sort of, okay, what's going on here? And I tried to lay out the facts insofar as I knew them, and just the life, insofar as I could fathom it. And the work, the work is genius. What we want to do with the rest is up to us now, and it's up to people now. But I don't think that part is open to too much argument.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:43:22]:
Right.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:43:23]:
There's so many books on Balanchine, and I wonder how if that felt daunting to you to kind of tackle this subject and how did you feel like, I'm going to make this book really stand apart and stand differently? Because it really does.
Jennifer Homans [00:43:36]:
Yeah. First of all, most of those books were written either when he was alive or soon after he died, and they were written by people who knew him well and people who participated in the whole endeavor, which you might say I did. But I was really there in the beginning, kind of as a I just happened to be there. I wasn't know part of it. I was never part of the New York City valley. So time, we have time, there was time now to look back. None of those histories are archival, none of them are archival. They're not histories. They're just books about Balanchine sheet, which is great, and I used them all, but this one was trying to do something different. The other thing is, and it sort of reflects back also on the last question that you asked, is that one of my goals was after talking to all of these people, and especially all of these women, was really to give their testimony. And that's why in some ways, I think it's great to be able to hear what these dancers, many of them in the court of ballet, who did not write memoirs, who did not have a chance to say what they thought and to be able to sort of give their ideas and their experiences some room. And so I tried to do that as well, just to sort of say what they said, say what they told me.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:45:12]:
Were there any stories in particular that were maybe surprising to you or interesting from the court of ballet? Because it's true we don't hear from them often.
Jennifer Homans [00:45:19]:
Oh, often. I mean, first of all, the one thing I learned about these dancers is they were to a single person, as far as I could tell, and I really did interview a lot of them, they were fascinating, eccentric, interesting people with ideas and imagination about what they had been doing and why they were there. These were not people who didn't sort of think and read. That whole world is sometimes portrayed as a place where people are so focused on doing, which, of course, they are, right? And the present moment, which, of course, they are. And that's one of the big arguments of the book, is this sort of idea of the radical present. But these were also people who had very diverse experiences, and they came from families that were often, in some ways broken, and especially in the early years, not so much later, but in the early years. So there's a way in which their experiences are part of the weave of his life, and they're part of the way in which his life I mean, they influence him. He influences them. They see themselves differently when he's watching them. I mean, just even think about the stage. He's standing in the first wing. He was always in the first wing. That's where he stood watching. He's watching the dancer. He's not watching the audience and how they react. He's watching the dance. The dancer is looking at the audience, but also at him. The audience is looking at them. There's this interesting sort of triangle that's going on that's shaping the way people act on stage and the way that they are. They all said if he wasn't in the first wing, it changed everything for some reason, which was rare. So there's a way in which they all are informing each other. It's all part of the same performance. It's not just, okay, these dancers get up, they do certain things, musicians play, and everybody goes home. It's like this whole sort of organic community that's created at this moment, and then it's over.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:38]:
This is all just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, I could sit here for hours with you, and we really encourage everyone to read the book. It's so fabulous. Thank you so much for joining us, Jennifer, and it's always a pleasure to have you.
Jennifer Homans [00:47:51]:
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Thank you.
Michael Sean Breeden [00:47:54]:
Thank you, everyone.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:47:54]:
Thanks, everyone.
Jennifer Homans [00:47:57]:
Thank you all for being here.
Rebecca King Ferraro [00:48:00]:
Get Jennifer's book. Conversations on Dance is part of the Acas creator network. For more information, visit conversationsondancepodpod.com.