I initially found this book through a podcast from Articles of Interest on the design of pointe shoes (you can listen to it here as well). I immediately knew that I had to get my hands on this book, I have struggled for so long with media around dance and ballet in particular. Most stories and books about it typically glamorize the art form while when I was growing up in dance classes, I had a much more complicated relationship to dance. I loved dancing, but I could not wait to get out of class. I put so much pressure on myself to do well, and look good, and it made a lot of it miserable for me. I kept comparing myself to other girls in my class, learned to ignore the pain in my feet, and it was not until college that I unlearned a lot of this and just had fun dancing again.
This book was like a whole therapy session for me. Robb uses her experience dancing at the School of American Ballet for ten years as the backdrop to talk about ballet as a whole. She covers important aspects like how Balanchine is essentially worshipped as the ambassador of ballet to America, and how that legacy tends to overlook his sexual harassment or how he single handedly shortened more ballerinas careers by pushing their bodies to the limit. Similarly she talks about gender roles in ballet, how there’s always men in charge while the women are a dime a dozen. There’s a great chapter on control and how regimented each ballet class is, but how this can be an escape for the young dancers in that it is a constant. You always know how each dance class is going to go.
Another chapter talks about how using your body as an instrument makes you less likely to pick up on social cues like flirting. If you’re in physical contact with other people all the time, holding hands does not seem like much. Ballet also leads to a lot of unhealthy weight loss, pretty much all professional dancers are restricting their intake to keep their “ballet body.” And it is interesting that most other places the body positive movement has made an impact, but dancers can still get called “fat” all the time.
The pain chapter was hard for me to read. I don’t do well with body horror, and I know that dancers dance on broken toes and things like that all the time, but it’s so hard to hear about what people have put themselves through in the name of dance. She then broadens it to talk about masochism and how some dancers have gone on to write about their experiences with that as well. Dancers also have a different relationship to time in that most dance careers are over by the age of 30. You have to get a lot done early on in order to be successful. And finally one of the most interesting chapters was about how dancers have a full sense of their body and control over it. Robb talks about different studies looking at this, and it is really cool to see the science side of this training.
So many chapters resonated with me personally. I remember being in college and thinking about how the men could do much worse in class and not get half the corrections the women did. I know growing up I found the structure of ballet incredibly useful, it let me drop all of my worries about classes and friends and just be in the moment. (Sidenote: I tried to get a travel grant once claiming that dance was a form of mindfulness and was not taken seriously at the time.) I think I was really lucky that I never developed an eating disorder, as it is I mostly just think of myself as “chunky” even though I’m sure my friends would never describe me that way. And even though the pain chapter was hard, it does resonate. I remember being in other dance classes, sharing that I was in pain, and being told to sit down even though my ballet training told me to keep going. It teaches you that your pain does not matter, and I have had a really hard time unlearning that one.
The chapter I have the hardest time wrapping my mind around is the one on flirting and relationships. It makes me wonder, as an asexual dancer, did I have a better time with dance because of the sterile nature of ballet? There is not any sex or kissing in classical ballet, maybe that’s why I have been so drawn to this art form. Once I got older and hit the gyrating, swaying thing that is modern dance, that really put me off. I have writtenabout this elsewhere, but the dance world as a whole is not kind to asexuals since so much of dance is about sex. It is not something I have given much thought to, but maybe there is something there. Robb mostly focuses on straight ballerinas in this chapter, but I wonder if it would look different if she talked to some queer ones? Not even just asexuals, I figured at some point there would be a discussion of queer relationships among the female dancers, but that never came up.
At the same time though, I wonder how much of this is just being an artist or being raised female. Women are always minimizing their pain, most women underestimate the pain of their menstruation, and even when they voice their discomfort men tend to overlook it. And the sections that talk about competition amongst the dancers I think is ubiquitous to art. In music I am always comparing myself to others, as well as dance. Even though it has narrow considerations, I think there is a lot of weight to this in that most dancers are female and all dancers are artists, so still is an accurate description of the experience.
I truly cannot recommend this book enough, I think it gives
a really accurate and honest portrayal of the ballet world. Both the good and
the bad. We need more books like this that talk from personal experiences with
the art form instead of what society at large perceives the dancers to be. I am
so happy that I read it.
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