Once A Dancer

One of the greatest of George Balanchine's ballerinas, Allegra Kent joined the New York City Ballet at the age of fifteen and only two years later inspired Balanchine's "The Unanswered Question" (from Ivesiana). Beautiful, sensuous, mysterious, she quickly became an essential Balanchine dancer. He created central roles for her in Episodes, Bugaku, The Seven Deadly Sins, Stars and Stripes, and the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet, as well as reviving La Sonnambula for her. An immense favorite of audiences here and abroad, she had a particularly spectacular success on the company's famous Russian tour in 1962. But the story of her personal life is at least as dramatic as the story of her rise to fame. Raised haphazardly by a mostly absent father and an all-too-present mother, she married the first man she ever dated, the celebrated (and complicated) photographer Bert Stern. And she suspended her career three times to have children, no matter what the cost to her work. Allegra Kent is today a triumphant survivor of a difficult, troubled, yet deeply gratifying life, and her writing reflects the intelligence, grace, and artistry that characterized her dancing. Her account of a bizarre childhood, a magnificent if unusual dance career, a charged, complicated, domestic life, and a never-ending struggle with emotional, physical, and financial pressures is fascinating as are her portraits of the other great dance figures who punctuated her life, from Balanchine to Baryshnikov.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.