Dance Scholarship Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Life Writing present:

Professor Dame Hermione Lee (Oxford) in conversation with Jennifer Homans (NYU, Director, Center for Ballet and the Arts in New York City) for the launch of Homans’s stunning new biography of the great twentieth-century choreographer, George Balanchine: Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century (Granta 2022)

George Balanchine did for dance what Picasso did for painting: he changed the art and the way we see the human form. Homans follows Balanchine from his childhood in Tsarist St Petersburg, through the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, two World Wars, and the cultural Cold War, to New York, where he co-founded and ran the New York City Ballet.

Followed by drinks reception; free and open to all.

Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for the New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet was a bestseller and named one of the 10 best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, she performed professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Hermione Lee is a biographer and Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University.

This event is a collaboration between DANSOX and OCLW. It will take place in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (JdP).

DANSOX and OCLW advise caution by wearing masks and not attending if you are feeling unwell.