"The Dreams of Poets Taken Seriously"

"While it took a Frenchman, Petipa, to make ballet Russian, it took a Russian, Balanchine, to make it American—the most unlikely transposition the art form has ever experienced. 'Classical ballet was everything America was against,' Homans explains. 'It was a lavish, aristocratic court art, a high—and hierarchical—elite art with no pretense to egalitarianism' designed 'to promote and glorify kings and czars.' Whose divine right would it promote in the land of the equal, the free, the duly (and unduly) elected? But as Balan­chine was fond of saying in the face of the impossible, or highly inadvisable, 'Nevertheless. . . .' And he proceeded to give American dancers an aristocracy all their own."

Toni Bentley reviews Jennifer Homans's Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet in The New York Times.