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Balanchine & The Lost Muse

Book review: Balanchine & The Lost Muse

There is something almost painfully romantic about the memories of viewers wowed by dancers you yourself never had the chance to see. Take this account by Russian ballet dancer Vera Kostrovitskaya, who came of age at the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg, amid the chaotic, difficult years surrounding the 1917 revolution:

LIFE
NYT

There is something almost painfully romantic about the memories of viewers wowed by dancers you yourself never had the chance to see. Take this account by Russian ballet dancer Vera Kostrovitskaya, who came of age at the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg, amid the chaotic, difficult years surrounding the 1917 revolution:

"Has it happened to you that you didn't even listen to the music as you watched, because the whole body of the artist, her whole being, has become this music? That miracle occurred in my life twice. The first time - Lida; the second - Alicia Alonso."

Alonso, the Cuban ballerina who gave her final performance in 1995 at the age of 75, is known around the world. But Lida, or Lidochka Ivanova, had only a brief career before she was killed in 1924 at the age of 20 in a murky boating mishap in what is now St Petersburg.

Out of this gloom comes Elizabeth Kendall's . George Balanchine also belonged to the war-torn academy generation. Less than a month after Ivanova's death, he would leave St Petersburg, embarking on a dazzling game changer of a career: as dance maker for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, founder of New York City Ballet, pioneer of a dance aesthetic both classical and modern. Kendall's compact history is primarily a portrait of the artist as a very young man - when he was still Georgi, and then Georges, Balanchivadze - with Ivanova as a shadowy female counterpart.

As Kendall acknowledges, there is far more Balanchine-related than Ivanova-related material to be mined. But she attempts throughout to position Ivanova as a peer of the young choreographer, and as a central, dynamic figure of her times, one who "had stumbled on ballet's missing revolutionary agenda".

Kendall's synthesis of varied materials is brisk and lively, infused with musings on gender, the mysteries of individual artists, and the larger relationship of ballet to shifting political structures. Yet the evocative details she deals in are often fragmentary, conflicting or remembered by people such as Kostrovitskaya decades after they occurred. Sometimes they are altogether absent, particularly when it comes to Ivanova's life - and death, which was considered suspicious by many.

Throughout the book you can feel Kendall coaxing these impressions, pulling from numerous Russian- and English-language sources to bring out a fuller portrait. (The endnotes describing her efforts are often as intriguing as the text, particularly her diligent work in tracking down Russian materials.)

Yet Kendall is an endearing and affectionate observer; you feel her seeking an intimacy with her subjects with the excitement of a detective sensing heat in a cold case. And the larger portrait she paints, of two curious, forward-looking artists forged in the same fires, is worth spending some time with.

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