Sex and dance were the twin themes of George Balanchine’s life. ‘I am a cloud in trousers,’ he said, using a phrase borrowed from the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Jennifer Homans quotes the sentence early in her biography of the man who co-founded New York City Ballet:
What this suggested, and it was a central theme of his life, was that he felt like a man with two bodies and he lived in them both simultaneously, with at times heartbreaking personal consequences.
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