Happy 120th Birthday, Mr. B!
- Lauryn Johnson
- Jan 22, 2024
- 1 min read
To craft just the right caption for this anniversary, I scoured my library of Balanchine books and settled on the following 6 quotes from his dancers and supporters. I hope you will celebrate Mr. B’s work year-round with me! At the end of this post I've included a 90-second documentary about Balanchine's life. Be sure to watch it!
“Balanchine is sincere to the art.”
—Alexandra Danilova in “Balanchine’s Ballerinas”
“He made enough beautiful ballets to fill and fulfill hundreds of dancers for hundreds of years.”
—Suzanne Farrell in “Holding onto the Air”
“What a very particular offering Balanchine provided, waking in us […] a wide-open, unstoppable, unquestioned desire to give one’s self, one’s best self, one’s better-than-one’s-best self, to something, something deeply physically and morally beautiful.”
—Toni Bentley in “Serenade: A Balanchine Story”
“My own feeling is that Balanchine never lost that sense of magic about the theater that he acquired when he was very young himself.”
—Nancy Lassalle “I Remember Balanchine”
“I think Balanchine is an enigma of a man. He was hard to understand, he had so many different qualities. I don’t think in the end that I really did comprehend him: such a complex mind is not easy to define.”
—Diana Adams in “I Remember Balanchine”
“I don’t think there is a definitive portrait of Balanchine. Everybody has a different view, a different perspective. Probably they are all true in certain ways and all lacking in certain ways”
—Betty Cage in “I Remember Balanchine”
1. Ernst Haas, 1962. Getty Images 2-3. Gjon Mili, 1965, 72. LIFE Magazine
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