Serenade: A Balanchine Story

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At age seventeen, Toni Bentley was chosen by Balanchine, then in his final years, to join the New York City Ballet. From both backstage and onstage, Bentley's new book Serenade: A Balanchine Story carries us through 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 his immigration to the United States from Soviet Russia; its mystical—and literal—embodiment of the tradition of classical ballet in just thirty-three minutes. Join YIVO for a discussion of this new book featuring Bentley in conversation with YIVO's Executive Director Jonathan Brent, including a discussion of how researching this book brought Bentley to YIVO, even though Balanchine was not Jewish.

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About the Author

Toni Bentley danced with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet for ten years. She is the author of five New York Times Notable Books, including Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, Holding On to the Air (coauthored with Suzanne Farrell), and The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. Bentley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Best American Essays as well as in many periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, The Daily Beast, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.