About this item
A ballerina tells the story of Serenade, George Balanchine's iconic masterpiece, and what it was like to be one of the young women who danced it - and lived it - during his lifetime.At age seventeen, Toni Bentley was chosen by Balanchine, then in his final years, to join the New York City Ballet. From backstage and onstage, Bentley carries us through both the serendipitous history and physical intricacies and demands of Serenade: its dazzling opening, with seventeen women in a double-diamond pattern; its radical, even jazzy, use of the highly refined language that is ballet; its place in the choreographer's own dramatic story of immigration to the United States from Soviet Russia; its profound influence on the art form internationally.Bentley takes us inside the rarefied, intense, and thrilling world Balanchine created through his lifelong devotion to celebrating and expanding female beauty and strength - a world that, inevitably, passed upon his death.
About the Author
Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five books, all named New York Times Notable Books, which include "Winter Season, A Dancer's Journal," "Holding On to the Air" (the autobiography of Suzanne Farrell co-authored with Farrell) , "Costumes by Karinska," "Sisters of Salome," and "The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir. " Her essay, "The Bad Lion" (originally published in the New York Review of Books) was selected by Christopher Hitchens for Best American Essays 2010. She writes frequently for the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, Playboy, the Daily Beast, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications. She has been invited to give talks at Harvard, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rutgers, Middlebury College and the THiNK Conference 2013 in Goa, India. "The Surrender" has been adapted into a one-woman play that premiered in January 2013 in a production by the Spanish National Theater in Madrid, Spain, and it will have its English-language world premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2013. She is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.
