Georgi Balanchivadze and Mr. B: his life shaped his work in unexpected ways, as these new biographies reveal.

All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine By Terry Teachout. New York: Harcourt, 2004. 208 pp. Illustrated. $22.

George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker By Robert Gottlieb. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. 224 pp. Illustrated. $19.95.

"It's like watching light pass through a prism," said Martha Graham on the only occasion (in 1959) when she watched George Balanchine choreograph. What she meant was that music seemed to pass through him and become, with no visible effort, dance steps. Indeed, all different kinds of dance steps, tailored to all different kinds of music, poured out of Balanchine over the 79 years of his life (1904-1983). He made such a vast repertoire for his New York City, Ballet, full of such a range of moods, that if you try to find one work to show "the Balanchine style," it's impossible.

This poses a challenge for biographers. How do you find the personality' of someone who had the ability, to dissolve his very identity in the music? Still, two new short biographies try to catch the man behind the work. They're both by respected critics: Terry Teachout and Robert Gottlieb. They're published this year because of Balanchine's centennial (he would have been 100 last January). Neither book sets out to describe the master in the process of choreographing. If you want to witness the birth pangs of Agon, read Bernard Taper's longer (and classic) Balanchine (Times Books, 1984). Both want to do what the short biography excels at: Choose the pithiest details so the man comes alive.

But what different men they give us. Teachout starts out charmingly enough, with the moment he fell in love with Balanchine's work. It was 1987. The curtain came down on Concerto Barocco and he sat rooted in his seat, "eyes wide with astonishment." But when he starts with tire life, something happens to his tone. It's hard to imagine flattening the tale of a young ballet student in the chaos of the Russian Revolution, who escapes at 20 with a little band of colleagues, works for the famous Diaghilev, knocks around Europe until he's miraculously brought to America, where he builds a ballet empire. Teachout does. He shows a weird impulse to be master of ceremonies in his subject's life--to minimize here, maximize there. The young Balanchine's constant hunger in those dark, post-revolutionary years, he calls "inadequate meals." His subject's daring, eroticized first ballets, choreographed at age 16, are labeled "more than merely promising." And maybe not trusting his own claims for his hero, Teachout ends up bashing Balanchine's predecessors and partners on the head.

This is the kind of book that incites you to write indignant remarks in the margins, like, "Excuse me?" next to the part where Teachout calls Michel Fokine's art-nouveau-flavored 1909 masterpiece Les Sylphides "a slow-moving succession of pretty poses." I don't think Teachout wants to be snide about Fokine--or any of the other figures he evokes dismissively (Diaghilev, Nijinska, Lincoln Kirstein, etc.). The problem may be that he doesn't know much about anything except Balanchine. So he comes out skewed on all other ballet figures. For most of the book, Teachout's Balanchine looks like a titan standing alone in a pygmy landscape--such a titan, in fact, that in the end even Balanchine can't live up to the Balanchine ideal. "A Morbid Interest in Women" is the name of Teachout's second-to-last chapter, about the master's passion for younger muses. It's a phrase quoted earlier; the homosexual Diaghilev said it about the young Balanchine. Still, Teachout's use of it as a chapter title underscores the problem of this well-meaning book: Its author doesn't know what he really thinks of its subject.

To his credit, Teachout isn't the only one who has trouble with Balanchine's seemingly inconstant relations with women. This is a big question mark in his life. It's what we who adore the work feel queasiest about. What do we do with the string of marriages and courtships--especially if we're women? How do we explain the confusing fact that in Balanchine's NYCB some young dancers were showered with the aging master's attention--with more than attention--while others were ignored?

Well ... we can be shocked. We can be loudly indignant. We can reject the work, the dancers, the aesthetic, and deprive ourselves of powerful infusions of beauty. We can pretend there's no problem because that's the sacrifice needed for the art, as many Balanchine-lovers have done up till now. Or we can look at the life and see the whole shape of it--the parts where Balanchine was supreme master, the parts where he was more like a lost child.

That's what Robert Gottlieb does in his short biography. There are places in this admirable book where you wish he would elucidate more. Readers without ballet history at their fingertips may have to look up a name or two. But he's got such a depth of knowledge (he's a Balanchine insider who served on NYCB's board, but is also a fan of other choreographers) that he can recognize and celebrate all the figures Teachout slights. People great and small are deftly evoked. My favorite is the Russian diva Tamara Toumanova, with her "astounding, implacable fouettes." Whole eras come and go on the page, like a 1948 New York "bursting ... with the heady excitement of finding itself the 'capital of the world'"--and its own ballet company.

When it comes to "Balanchine's women," Gottlieb breaks new ground. Wives and paramours are all here in this neat little book--Geva, Zorina, Danilova, Tallchief, LeClercq, Farrell, and more besides. But it's not just a list. We see a pattern: Some marriages serve as working partnerships; others founder in the depths of the master's longing. Nothing in the middle. Nor does Gottlieb lose sight of the connection between these various passions and the ballets they inspired. Ballets are made, after all, not from inanimate paint or clay, but from living human beings with needs and wants of their own. Balanchine struggled all his life with this contradiction, a struggle that grew acute as youthful longing persisted in an aging body.

To explain all this, Gottlieb tries something that's so far been politely off-limits in Balanchine studies: connecting the dots between the boy and the man. He rounds out the subject of Balanchine's family with sensitive speculation, which he makes a part of his chapter on City Ballet's 1962 Russian tour. This half-Georgian, half-Russian family was strangely absent in Balanchine's youth. His mother left him abruptly at the ballet school when he was 9; most of the family fled Petrograd for Georgia when he was 14 (although it seems, contrary to what Gottlieb says, that his mother stayed a bit longer alone). But by the time Balanchine returned to his homeland in 1962 to be reunited with his brother Andrei, silence, distance, war, and politics had done their work. The reunion was uneasy at best.

What we see by the end of this book is how the music and dancing stood in for lost family. Masterpieces came from that loneliness. Can we be shocked, though, if the man who kept his past at bay was shaken by such bouts of longing?

Balanchine was an exile even before he left Russia--an exile from his own family. His glory is that he carried in his exile's baggage--in his very body--all that was needed to remake his art, and himself, in the image of a new country. His tragedy is a familiar one to readers of great artists' biographies: the human cost of such a remaking. In the end, Teachout's book only touches on that duality; Gottlieb's, in a few swift strokes, gives us the glory and the tragedy.