Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost & Ballet Reborn by Elizabeth Kendall

Balanchine Finds His America provides a close-up of this crucial time in the life of a young immigrant choreographer who would become one of the 20th century's greatest artists. It opens on Balanchine's first day in the United States and closes 13 years later, with the culture's recognition of his importance. Along the way, it sketches in the extreme politics of his time from the Great Depression to WWII, evokes the places that inspired him from New York City to Hollywood, and charts the sexuality of longing that fueled his creative life, but also threatened his and his muses' personal stability. It draws connections between Balanchine's loves and the earliest ballets he made on American soil, especially his mysterious exploration of American romance, Serenade (1933), and his even more mysterious 1946 masterwork, The Four Temperaments, that pointed the way to America's victorious postwar art of abstraction. Most of all, this book highlights the young Balanchine's tragic yet triumphant inner journey towards American-ness, and the impact of this journey on the ballet organizations he helped form and the legacy he left the world.