Huge thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for naming me a 2017 Fellow! Their support will enable me to research and write my book, a biography of Tanaquil Le Clercq–a great ballerina, the fifth and last wife of George Balanchine. She was also a wonderful friend. The daughter of a St. Louis debutante and a translator of French literature who taught at Columbia University, Le Clercq personified the excitement of her time, with a performing style and personal demeanor that was sophisticated, witty, elegant, and fun. Here she is in Balanchine’s “La Valse,” in a role that still bears her image.
When, in 1956, on the New York City Ballet’s tour of Europe, she was stricken with polio in Copenhagen, the news made international headlines. She was 27. Paralyzed from the waist down, she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. But her keen intelligence, her sense of humor, her love for Balanchine and her admiration for his work–all this endured. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knew Tanaquil Le Clercq, her father, Jacques Le Clercq, or her mother, Edith Whittemore. Please contact me here.
In an effort to resuscitate Pittsburgh’s historic Granite Building by transforming it into The Forbes Hotel, I’ve been joined by an expert team of hospitality professionals. With the support of public officials and community leaders, we have secured a $2.5 million RACP grant from the state of Pennsylvania. Projected groundbreaking: summer 2017. Opening: fall 2018.
See the NYTimes for my thoughts on “La La Land” as the self-proclaimed prototype of a new genre: the reality-based musical. Because, apparently, it’s hard to relate to expertise….
My cover story on Sofia Coppola for The Gentlewoman’s Spring/Summer issue is out.
My interview with Jessica Chastain about her new film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, an adaptation of Diane Ackerman’s best-selling book based on the unpublished diaries of Antonina Zabinska, who, with her husband, smuggled some 300 Jews to freedom in Warsaw during the Second World War. The Zookeeper’s Wife,” appears in the March issue of W.
I wrote the introduction to “James Moore: Retrospective,” a book commemorating the work of an under-sung photographer who got his start at Harper’s Bazaar in the early 1960’s. His images–most of them unfamiliar, very few of them online–capture that era’s rigorous geometry and optimism.
My essay I wrote on the Royal Ballet’s production of “The Sleeping Beauty,” originally published in 1982 in The Atlantic, has been selected for the Library of America’s forthcoming anthology of dance writing, edited by Mindy Aloff. I’m honored to have my work included and delighted that this particular essay, with its assessment of what makes Tchaikovsky’s score ideal for dancing, will find a second audience. To be published in 2018.