George Jackson (1931-2024), RIP
News comes today that the dance critic and dance historian George Jackson, a longterm leading figure of the dance world of Washington D.C., died in his sleep on Monday, August 5, at age ninety-two. Following the deaths of Alan (“Mike”) Kriegsman (2012) and Alexandra Tomalonis (2023) - and the withdrawal of other critics from the American capital’s scene - this is a significant depletion of the ranks of authoritative dance figures in Washington D.C., where the status of the Kennedy Center alone - in addition to the city’s own dance scene - merits ardent opinion, informed argument, and experienced dance thinking.
With the tidings of George’s death, news also comes that he was a parasitologist (in which capacity he “worked for Rockefeller University in New York and later for the U.S. Government in Washington, D.C.”), that he published three novels under his original name Hans Georg Jakobowicz, and that he was the husband of dance photographer Costas. As we say nowadays, who knew? How marvellous. My thanks to Audrey Ross, Debra Levene, and Tomalonis for various writings that have given me information about him.
George Jackson was born in Vienna on December 10, 1931, was sent by train to London (the Kindertransport) to escape the Hitler regime, fell in love with ballet as an observer at age fourteen, and studied at the University of Chicago, becoming a microbiologist. As a dance critic (starting as early as 1950), he contributed - prolifically - to Washington DanceView and DanceView, the Washington Post, Dance Magazine, Dance Now, the German magazine Ballett, and many more publications until 2011, when he announced his retirement - a retirement, however, in which he continued to attend dance performances and to share thoughts and information with many colleagues, myself included.
It was in his eighties that his first novel, The King of Jerusalem (2014), was published: on its front cover is a photograph of Suzanne Farrell in George Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes. His second novel, Burn, Berlin, Burn, followed in 2018; as yet I have not found the name of the third.
George had singular and deep expertise in the history of dance in Vienna, but also of dance history far and wide. Long before I met him, I was given (in the early 1980s), a copy of a challenging and erudite essay he had written, probably in the 1960s, on the questionable importance of Lev Ivanov as a choreographer of Swan Lake: it took its place at once as an essay to be kept, considered, and consulted. This was before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when many went along with the Soviet notion that Ivanov was the soulfully Romantic artist whose originality was largely suppressed by the formalist but emptier Marius Petipa: George simply showed how much evidence there was to show that Petipa’s hand on the Odette scenes of Swan Lake was much stronger than had been appreciated - and his acquaintance with the evidence about the early performance history of that classic was immediately exceptional.
Yet George was not the kind of man to nail his colours doggedly to one opinion. In later decades, I learnt that he went on rethinking the importance qnd nature of Ivanov’s work, though without succumbing to the Soviet view. Like many in the ballet world, he took the music of Ludwig Minkus far more seriously than I do; unlike most of them, he knew - and let me and others know! - that we almost invariably hear it in poor modern arrangements.
Many of us also knew George as a figure of great courtesy. He never seemed to proclaim the importance of his opinions, but he was eager to share enthusiasm and information, historical information not least. When Alexei Ratmansky created his version of Richard Strauss’s ballet Whipped Cream (2017), many of us were curious about the Viennese circumstances that prompted Strauss to compose it in 1924. George was the ideal figure to consult here. I wish I had consulted him far more now, but I testify that his conversation was always affable, elegant, shrewd, and frequently informed by ardent interest in many figures in the dance world. I last saw him in February 2020, and last corresponded with him in January 2021. I knew that he and Costas were connected; I rejoice now to learn that their connection included marriage. I dearly wish now I had known George far better.
Tuesday 13 August