“The Ballerinas” by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

This book is the one that I picked up in Marquette, at Snowbound books (which I mentioned in my post about Marquette here). I wasn’t sure about this book, I mean it’s about ballet so I’m going to at least give it a glance. But a lot of ballet books that deal with “female violence” like the back of the book use ambition as the driving force and get more caught up in the aesthetic of ballet rather than what ballet is actually like (I never watched it but I think there was a season of like “Pretty Little Liars” or something that centered around a murder at a ballet school, that sort of thing). And since I actually am a dancer, I really just want something that resonates with my experiences. So I was hesitant about this book, until I picked it up, flipped through it, and saw the epigraph from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Then I knew this was a book I had to read.

The plot follows Delphine, a dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet from her adolescent years into adulthood. The way the chapters are structured, we get a snippet of Delphine as a teenager, and a portion of her life as an adult, having just returned to Paris. Delphine as a teenager is at ballet school with her best friend Margeaux, they then meet Lindsay who joins the program late and rounds out their trio. As an adult, Delphine is trying to get her new ballet off the ground as a budding choreographer, while reconnecting with her friends and her surrogate mother Stella. Delphine quickly realizes how much things have changed, Margeaux now no longer wants to be a dancer forever. Lindsay still does but after an accident years ago has a hard time partnering with anyone. Both are married, Delphine missed both of their weddings. Stella is about to have her hip replaced, but Delphine struggles to see Stella as a person and not her mother or another caretaker. Eventually though, a few secrets some to light. Delphine finds out that her crush from her teen years is sleeping around the cast and filming it secretly. She leaks it to the press and has to deal with the possibility of revenge porn. The accident that caused Lindsay’s injury was Delphine and Margeaux tripping her into the street before an audition since Lindsay wanted to sleep with one of the judges. And finally, it gets revealed how Delphine decided to return to Paris after finding out that her boyfriend, the one who encouraged her to choreograph, was a serial cheater and preventing her career from getting started. This culminates in Lindsay’s birthday where her husband is devastated that she had an abortion so that she could continue dancing, and he accidentally drops a bust on her foot. Delphine then gives him a shove, and sends him out of a window. She gets off with it being to protect her friend, and continues to choreograph. Lindsay accepts that she cannot dance anymore, and starts to teach English. And Margeaux also quits to try and start a family of her own.

Apologies for the huge paragraph of a summary, but I really didn’t know how to cut that in half or cut it down. There is so much going on in this story, but lets start with the structure of the chapters. Having the narrative partly be from their teen years and partly as adults is a really interesting idea. Of course eventually the teen narrative catches up to where the adult one began, completing the circle. It also reinforces this idea that Delphine has that when she returns to Paris, everything will be exactly the same as before. None of the in between things will have made a difference. And here the reader is with a snapshot of what those before times really were like.

So much of the book is about stories. But in a surprisingly subtle way. The most overt part of this has to do with Delphine as a choreographer, using bodies and music to tell stories. She starts with telling the story of the last Tsar of Russia, a story that she wants to be about how you can get everything that you want, and all that can destroy you. It’s very clearly about her experiences with this relationship that has just fallen apart and how she feels it is tearing her apart as well. This gets scrapped though, when the artistic director tells her to do some feminist-y piece. So instead of that, Delphine creates a solo dance to Janis Joplin that is all about the cycle of grief, particularly female grief. And she gets Lindsay to do it, she has the life experience from constantly yearning to be a principal. This new piece is much more intimate, and it has this cyclical nature to it. You will eventually recover from grief, and experience it again.

There’s another layer to the commentary on stories though. The entire time Delphine was away, she was telling herself stories about the people that she left behind. And instead of keeping up with them and what they were like, she trapped them into this story that she told herself. This almost destroys multiple relationships that she has: Stella and Margeaux. Margeaux has developed a drinking problem, she’s drunk all the time but Delphine doesn’t let herself see it. Stella also is her own person and does not exist to help Delphine, but Delphine needs that so badly that she keeps expecting so much from her. In the end though, Delphine is able to talk to them about it, apologize, and accept them for who they are and not who she wants them to be.

In contrast to this are all the male characters in the story. Ballet is an interesting example of these gender dynamics as it is mostly women, but almost all of the positions of responsibility are held by men. Men set the standards for how the women need to look and the women bend over backwards to meet that. One example of this is Delphine’s ex keeping her career small. He wants someone to be his unpaid assistant, not to have a mind of her own. Another is Delphine’s old crush who films himself having sex with women in the company. He wants them to just be objects, submissive and always willing. And finally there’s Lindsay’s husband. He refuses to believe that she won’t want to have children and give in to his goals in life, as opposed to letting her be in control of her life and her body. After Delphine pushes him out a window, she describes it as his suicide in that he brought that on himself by treating his wife like that, taking pleasure in her not achieving her goals so that he could have his. All of the men want to keep the women trapped into their ideas of how they should act instead of letting them be real people.

Of course, the book also has a lot to say about the dance world. Clearly the author was involved in ballet at some point, or I don’t think she could write this. There are a lot of details about how ballet works, when dancers go en pointe, how white-washed the ballet world is, things like that which I don’t think outsiders typically know. Really my only nitpick is that Delphine, Margeaux, and Lindsay all get into the company at the same time. The odds of that are astronomically small, but it has to work that way for the plot so whatever. But truly, so much of this resonated with my experiences. Delphine talks about leaving dance for choreography, and it almost mirrors my own. How I didn’t want to serve in someone else’s vision but instead create my own. And how much I miss being a more serious dancer. She also doesn’t shy away from the messy parts, how dancers are constantly dancing on injuries and hurting themselves without allowing enough time to heal. But also how strong and powerful they are. You can’t make it to a professional level any other way. There’s one part that mentions how ballet typically has a pink colored screen over it that softens all of the hard parts. This book doesn’t do it, it shows ballerinas as powerful and underlines how strange it is that a symbol of femininity is made up of underweight, overworked individuals.

The final theme I want to address is the theme of watching within the story. It is present from that opening epigraph, the quote talking about how learning that there is no God and no one is watching is the greatest tragedy. Dance is all about feeling watched, that there could be audience and cameras anywhere. That dancers need to be ready at any point to get a correction from the teacher that is watching. And it runs all through this book, both on stage and off. Women need to constantly act as though someone is watching just in general as they apply makeup and other techniques to alter their appearance. This is contrasted with seeing someone. Delphine finally learns to see the people around her for who they are. When Lindsay’s husband is killed she yells at him “you don’t see me!” It is watching as observation versus seeing as understanding.

In case you can’t tell from the amount that I’ve written about this, I adored this book and this story. It has been so long since I dove into a story to this extent and found it so fruitful to think about. I’m so glad that this exists, I feel like I’ve been searching my whole life for relatable ballet content, and now I got two books in a single summer. (The first was Don’t Think, Dear which I wrote about in this post and goes really well as a companion to this book.) Here’s hoping that I’m able to find some more, and that I get back into the studio to dance myself really soon.