I was a quiet, nervous little girl who didn’t much like the chaos of life. I could escape that, though, in the safety and discipline of the dance studio. With hair scraped back and uniform strict, the daily repetitions of mastering movement were profoundly reassuring. And my dreams were of a life of dance.
A ballet career, however, is a gruelling one, and all dancers, particularly female ones, face the constant impossibility of fulfilling that dream. From a very young age and at each step along the way, we are picked out or cast aside; we are encouraged or not; given attention or ignored; we land our perfect role or our names are left off the cast lists. We must sacrifice everything for dance.
The constant sense of competition, the impossible physical standards and punishing hours can be a source of anxiety and distress. But here is the inherent contradiction: it is the dance — the movement, the music, the choreography — which is also a salve for these emotions.
Dance was the love of Alice Robb’s life, but then it abandoned her. In her new book, Don’t think dear: On loving and leaving ballet, she brings that sense of competition to life. She describes dance as though it were an abusive lover: one that consumed her every waking moment, her body, mind and soul, only to walk out on her. And she never quite recovered. Sadly, her focus in the book is on the leaving, not the staying.
Her choice of title rather gives the game away. It refers to the “genius of ballet” George Balanchine, who ruled the aesthetic of the US style of ballet for a long period and is still worshipped today. Balanchine created and adored the svelte, skinny lines of the modern ballerina. “In my ballets, women are first,” he would say. And he created astonishing roles for his chosen few. The irony was that he did this by exerting overwhelming control over women, always patronisingly commanding: “Don’t think dear!” In other words: do as you are told. Don’t question, don’t ask, don’t you dare to think.
There are distinct parallels, which Robb sketches out, between Balanchine’s behaviour and the abuses of the modern ballet masters during our #MeToo era. Balanchine’s muse Carol Sumner jokes how Mr B “was very grabby” and would “be arrested today”, yet insists she is “on Mr B’s side”. Her joking hides the brutal aesthetic Balanchine brought in: no dancer could ever be too thin. “I want to see bones,” he said. Dancer Gelsey Kirkland describes living with an eating disorder, the inevitable side effect of his “concentration camp aesthetic”.
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