Showing results by narrator "Toni Bentley" in All Categories

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, she 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.

Toni Bentley danced with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet and is the author of six books—all named New York Times “Notable Books" of the year. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and her essay, “The Bad Lion,” (originally published in the New York Review of Books) was selected by Christopher Hitchens for Best American Essays 2010. The Surrender was the winner of the Charity Erotic Awards Writer of the Year.