Interview: Jennifer Homans, author

Jennifer Homans has ruffled a few tutus with her history of ballet, in which she concludes that the art is dying. She talks to Jennifer McDonald

IT is not the typical academic who studies the political and cultural history of nations by trying to locate those histories within her body. Yet that was precisely the approach taken by Jennifer Homans, a former professional ballet dancer turned historian and critic, whose enormous new history of classical ballet, Apollo's Angels, has just been published.

In France Homans unearthed rehearsal notes that sent her back to the ballet studio. They were "longhand things a dancer might write — pas de bourre, port de bras — and sketches by choreographers," she says during an interview in her apartment in New York's Washington Square. One set of notebooks had music written above the dance notations, so she found a violinist to record the music, then spent hours reconstructing the original movement, setting steps to sound.

Apollo's Angels, traces four centuries of ballet - from its origins in 16th-century France to its elevation in the court of Versailles, through the Renaissance, Bolshevism, modernism and the Cold War - describing the dance's evolutions and revolutions in the context of political, philosophical and aesthetic currents. "The steps were never just the steps," Homans writes. "They were a set of beliefs."

The book took ten years to research and write, but it was a lifetime in the making. "I think I was always stranded between two worlds," says Homans, who has been the dance critic for the New Republic magazine since 2001 and is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University. "When I was dancing, I always had a book in my hand, and when I was in the world of my childhood — and later the academic world — I always had a foot in the dance studio."

Early response to Apollo's Angels has been spirited, with critics driven to both high praise and high pique. Rachel Howard, who reviews dance for the San Francisco Chronicle, called the book "intellectually rigorous" and "beautifully written," though she objected to the American chapters' narrow geographical perspective and criticised the omission of such choreographers as Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky and William Forsythe.

What's most ruffled swan feathers, though, is the melancholic epilogue, in which Homans writes: "After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying." (Howard, for one, faulted the book's final pages for abandoning "admirable analysis for unsubstantiated forecasting.")

Homans began developing her case in her earliest articles for the New Republic and in a 2002 article in the New York Times, in which she bemoaned New York City Ballet's lack of lustre in the post-Balanchine era. After that article appeared, the critic Clive Barnes wrote a fierce rebuttal in Dance Magazine, condemning it as "a cult/fashion view rather than a truly critical opinion."

Homans says she would be pleased to stir up a hornets' nest again: "To the extent that the epilogue of my book addresses choreographers and artistic directors, it is to say: ‘Look at the history. Ballet is in decline. Something needs to change.' "

At 50, Homans still has a dancer's lithe arms and legs. When she walks, she moves with nimble grace, her feet turned out 45 degrees. Her apartment is filled with books and family photographs: Homans as a teenager, sewing her pointe shoes. Her sons Daniel, 16, and Nicholas, 13. And on a mantelpiece, Homans embracing her husband of 17 years, Tony Judt — a historian, author and academic who died of Lou Gehrig's disease in August.

Homans was deep into the writing of Apollo's Angels in 2008 when Mr. Judt's illness was diagnosed. Even as he lost the ability to walk, to breathe on his own, he continued working, composing a series of memorable essays for the New York Review. Ms Homans, meanwhile, was dealt additional blows: her father died suddenly following a stroke last year, and her mother succumbed to cancer five months later.

Homans prefers not to revisit that period. But friends spoke of her ordeal. "She completed this book through a torturous time," says Catherine Oppenheimer, a former City Ballet dancer who met Homans when both were students at the School of American Ballet. "A lot of people would have dropped it, but I think that was the dancer's discipline coming back."

Homans began ballet lessons at the age of eight in Chicago, where she grew up one of three daughters of University of Chicago intellectuals. Literature, music and art were a part of family life, and it was a given, Ms. Homans said, that "ideas really mattered".

The notion of ballet as a calling came later, when at 13 she enrolled in classes at the University of Chicago taught by a former National Ballet of Canada dancer who was pursuing a doctorate in physics. "There was an intellectual component to the classes that was very appealing," she says. The teacher "would come in and say, ‘I was just studying the physics of centrifugal force, and this is how you're going to turn.' "

Homans left Chicago to pursue more serious training, first at the North Carolina School of the Arts, then at the School of American Ballet, at a time when the legendary George Balanchine still reigned. She had hoped to ascend to City Ballet, but when Balanchine made his annual visit to select dancers for his company, she was out with an injury.

Picking herself up, she travelled west, to San Francisco Ballet and finally to Pacific Northwest Ballet, where she danced for four years. But at 26 she chose to stop.

"I was bored," Homans says. "It's strange to say, because I still loved to dance. But you're in a studio many hours a day, and often you're waiting for someone else to come up with ideas. At a certain point I wanted to be the one with the ideas."

Her decision took her to Columbia University and then to the doctoral programme in history at New York University. There she became convinced that the story of ballet was a valid subject for scholarly investigation. And there she met Judt. "Tony always had a kind of moral core to the way he approached history," Homans says. "He believed in truth, and I do too. Not that there is an absolute truth that you can hold on to, but that you have to at least strive for a coherent story that's going to make sense of everything in ways that are honest."

Homans's stringent standards, depth of knowledge and belief in scrupulous argument seized the attention of Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic, who invited her to be the magazine's dance critic. He has now been a friend for ten years.

Among critics "you can find people who can do the aesthetic, formal and sensual dimensions, but they can't do the social, cultural and political dimensions," Wieseltier says. "Or you can find critics who will tell you about politics and society and ideology, but they don't know the steps or they can't read the music.

"So to find someone who can combine all the dimensions - that is rare."

In Apollo's Angels, Homans writes that she worries about ballet in part because artists today seem "confused" by their inheritance, "unable to build on its foundation yet unwilling to throw it off in favour of a vision of their own."

She acknowledges that when she was dancing, she did not often look to history. Even when she did turn to books, she says, the few she found had little of interest to say.

She hopes, then, that Apollo's Angels may fill a void and become "a resource for artists — choreographers and dancers — who will now be able to go back and say, 'Wait a minute, here are some ideas from the past that might inspire us.' "

• Apollo's Angels by Jennifer Holmans is published by Granta Books, priced 30