Massine: A Biography
An engaging and essential portrait of a titan of 20th-century dance, this colorful biography of Russian-born Leonide Massine (1895-1979) profiles an astonishingly inventive choreographer who was also a consummate "dancer-actor" capable of creating rounded, convincing characters. Massine's early choreography, reflecting his collaborations with Picasso, Matisse and Andre Masson, and with composers Igor Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla and Erik Satie, embodied a cubist-influenced assault on the body image. In the late 1930s, he produced abstract symphonic ballets suggesting cosmic conflict, violence, loss of love, destruction?a corollary to the global anxiety engendered by the rise of fascism. Later, he did story ballets like the film The Red Shoes (1948) and embraced eclecticism, but the public moved away from his stylized idiom. The late Garcia-Marquez (The Ballets Russes) interviewed Massine extensively in 1978, yet the very private, demanding, possessive, often tyrannical genius remains elusive, although we get a fairly candid account of his stormy affair with impresario Sergey Diaghilev, his four marriages and his increasing obsession with art as a substitute for human relationships. Photos.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.