Co-writing Elena Tchernichova’s memoir has been a voyage into my own past as well, since I was friends with her as many of the book’s events unfolded.
In the Preface, I recall:
“November 21, 1981, in the studios of American Ballet Theatre at Nineteenth Street and Broadway in Manhattan. ABT was then in the process of reviving George Balanchine’s 1949 Bourrée Fantasque, which had been dropped by New York City Ballet over a decade earlier. I was twenty-two and just starting to write about dance. I hadn’t yet had anything published on the subject, but audaciously I decided that I wanted to write a book on Tanaquil Le Clercq, who had been one of Bourrée’s original stars. . . ”
And was the rest history?
I only know that “my adventures with her on three continents” gave me “a great education in how ballet is put together.”