is honored to announce
the Winner of the
17th Marfield Prize
for outstanding writing
about the arts in 2022 to
Jennifer Homans
author of
“Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century”
Ms.Homans will receive $10,000
as the Marfield award winner for 2022.
“This: the suffering, the grit and hardship of everyday life, never once appeared in Balanchine’s dances. It did not interest him—it was pedestrian, a degradation of the human body and spirit. Even the dead bodies in his ballets were set against a backdrop of eternity and had a sense of spirituality and redemption that elevated the body out of the ordinary—dead bodies, yes, but really dead souls. These were bodies purified and transfigured by the disciplined practices of ballet. And if loss was a theme in his dances, so were love and full-fleshed joy. He made many gorgeously costumed ballets that built to a crescendo with colorful kaleidoscope patterns of dancers synchronizing ever more complicated and demanding rhythms. These were fantastic entertainments that lifted audiences into the great good humor of being alive. He saw himself as a musician and theater man, a traveling ballet master, and he had worked in great opera houses and touring troupes, from the Russian czar’s Mariinsky Theater of his training and youth to the Paris Opera, Broadway, Hollywood, and his own New York City Ballet (NYCB), which he cofounded in 1948. He said he was a showman, and like the old commedia dell’arte performers, he reinvented himself many times. He seemed ageless. For his dancers, even at the end of his life, “Mr. B” was a god and they surrendered their own young lives for a chance to dance his glorious ballets”
book cover by Random House
photograph by Brigitte Lacombe
Jennifer Homans is the dance critic for The New Yorker. Her widely acclaimed, bestselling Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Trained in dance at George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, Homans danced professionally with the Pacific Northwest Ballet. She earned her BA at Columbia University and her PhD in modern European history at New York University, where she is a Scholar in Residence and the Founding Director of the Center for Ballet and the Arts.
The Marfield Prize Committee would like to thank all volunteer readers, both Club members and community members, who generously gave their time and insights to read and rate dozens of books that were considered during the initial phase of the 2022 Marfield Prize.
The Marfield Prize or the National Award for Arts Writing is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington to the author of a nonfiction book about the visual, literary, media, or performing arts. Established to generate broader interest in the arts among general readers, the award celebrates prose that is clear, eloquent and inspiring, creating a strong connection with the arts and artists. Books are judged by a distinguished independent panel of judges. First given in 2006, the prize's endowment was established by a devoted and generous Arts Club member Jeannie S. Marfield.