Dont think dear, p.7
Don't Think, Dear, page 7
The ballerina who is formidable in the studio but awkward and stiff on the dance floor is a subset of the uptight-bunhead stereotype, parodied and immortalized in the ballet canon. In the 2003 rom-com Uptown Girls, an eight-year-old hypochondriac named Ray (played by Dakota Fanning) loves her weekly ballet class (populated, in the film, by several of my SAB classmates, including Emily and Flora) but freezes up when, toward the end of class, the teacher announces that there are five minutes left: Time to freestyle! While the other girls cheer the news—Emily pumps her fists and does a cartwheel—Ray packs her bag, storms out of the studio, and starts buttoning up her crisp, white blouse.
The nineteen-year-old narrator of Sophie Flack’s novel Bunheads, Hannah, a professional dancer with a thinly veiled New York City Ballet, is confident dancing before an audience of two thousand discerning New Yorkers. But when a new “real-world” friend invites her to a party and she finds herself in a throng of college students gyrating to Beyoncé, she doesn’t know what to do with her body. “The funny thing is that I’m embarrassed to dance in a situation like this; I don’t know how to do it like a normal person,” Hannah says. “I’m used to having everything choreographed for me, not all improvisational and loose.”
At summer programs, we were sometimes required—in a token gesture at rounding out our education—to take classes in hip-hop and jazz. I was terrible at them, but I secretly took pride in the teachers’ admonitions to let go: I was an incorrigible bunhead. I recently dug up an old VHS recording of an end-of-summer recital from a program I attended in 2005. After a twee ballet piece, in which we tiptoed in and out of dainty diagonals while holding pastel scarves above our heads, the piano faded out, and the music changed. The volume rose, and Paula Abdul giggled and moaned: “Work it, baby!” I watched the tape with my mom, and we laughed so hard we cried—but even as I experienced a full-body cringe, I wanted to defend the thirteen-year-old half-heartedly undulating on the screen. Watching her, I remembered the precise strategy I had deployed for getting through the piece, doing just enough that I wouldn’t stand out—carefully going through the motions of the choreography, making sure I was in the right place at the right time—but without actually committing to the dance. Instead of shimmying my shoulders or shaking my hips, I pointed my feet and squared my back as if I was in ballet class—clinging to the rules that made me feel safe.
The regimented discipline of ballet can be a lifeline for those suffering from trauma or going through uncertain times. I wasn’t surprised when millions of lapsed dancers flocked to virtual ballet classes at the start of Covid. Confined to my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment in March 2020, there were days I doubted my own existence. Without really thinking about it, I rested a hand on the kitchen counter and started doing tendus—front, side, back, and side; right leg, left leg . . .
But it works in more quotidian times, too. We all—to some degree—long for boundaries. We all reckon with a tension between our desire for freedom and our desire for order; between the risk of chaos and the risk of repression. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” wrote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—the consequence of looking too long into the “yawning abyss” of possibilities. So—in order to survive—we close our eyes to some of them; we give ourselves borders and box ourselves in. We build cocoons, metaphorical or not. The writer Jessica Gross takes comfort in small spaces and calls herself a “claustrophile”; in an essay for Longreads, she writes ecstatically of “the pure relief of containment” afforded by a small study carrel, a cramped train cabin, a corner seat.
There is a scene in the popular TV show Fleabag in which the rudderless protagonist, who has for ten episodes been struggling to find some kind of anchor—to a relationship or an ambition or a community—breaks down and confesses her true desire. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning,” she says. She is sitting in a confessional booth, crying in front of a priest who is also the object of her latest sexual fixation. “I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love and how to tell them.” This scene was endlessly memed, and praised for its relatability. The speech “resonated for reasons totally outside the show,” wrote a reviewer for Vice: “We are surrounded by so much stuff . . . that often it can be hard to root out what you really want or think or even know.” Fleabag captures the fantasy of surrender—of throwing up your hands and letting a ready-made ideology, or even a single person, fill in for the whole hard work of becoming.
When I watched this scene, I thought about ballet, and how it fulfilled so many of these desires. I thought about how dancers don’t have to decide what to wear in the morning. I thought of Balanchine, who told his dancers who to vote for (conservatives), who to love (him), and what to eat (not much). Of how Toni Bentley had captured the dancer’s mentality—the perverse pleasure of abdicating responsibility—in her first memoir. At twenty-two, she already understood: “We have no choice; we choose to have no choice.”
The cost of having choices is high: you might make the wrong one. Those who thrive in ballet find ways to express themselves, to maintain their individuality while staying within the bounds of traditional etiquette and technique. It’s the tension between the system and the individual that creates an electric charge for the viewer. Misty’s stardom stems from her pristine classical technique, and from the many ways in which she conforms, as much as from her difference.
Little Rats
Growing up, my dad often took me to the Met on Saturday afternoons. We would stroll through Central Park, past the tourists tossing coins into Bethesda Fountain and lazing on rowboats in the lake, past the pretzel carts and peanut stands, until we reached the magnificent art palace on Fifth Avenue. We collected our “M” buttons and clipped them to our shirts and then walked through the Great Hall, gazing up at the grand columns and archways all around us. We could have seen treasures from ancient Greece or mummies from Egypt or masterpieces from the Dutch Golden Age, but I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Up the staircase and to the left, ignoring the sculpture court on the right and the Spanish relics on the left, through the photo exhibit, into European Paintings, and there they were: my beloved Degas.
I would hurry past his figurines—there was something eerie about those dark naked shapes, with their blurry faces and sloppy bronze skin—and arrive, at last, at the paintings: luscious dreamscapes, lovely dancers in turquoise tutus and lace bodices with red ribbons in their hair; dancers practicing at the barre, stretching and preening backstage. I looked at them so long I felt like I could crawl into the frames, could leave behind the crowded neon chaos of 1990s New York and live in this world of quiet beauty, of violins and lamplight and watering cans in the corner. When I was done staring at these scenes—or, more likely, when my dad had tired of watching me—it was time to visit my favorite piece of all: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.
Degas’s sculpture of a poor Paris Opera student stands in the middle of the room, elevated and alone, her feet apart and her hands clasped behind her back. I circled her on her pedestal, examining her half-closed eyes and her strange, flat face, admiring the real silk ribbon in her metal braid and the cotton tutu around her waist. From one angle, she looked proud, as if she were peering down her nose at me; from another, I thought she seemed tired but at peace, lost in some private fantasy. Or perhaps she looked resigned, like the best she could do was to shut her eyes to the world. (In my favorite picture book, she waited until the last visitor had left the museum and then came to life, jumping down from her pedestal to haunt the empty galleries.)
My dad would try to interest me in the Rembrandts and the Vermeers—but these excursions, for me, were always about Degas. One afternoon, we visited the museum’s gift shop, and I was allowed to pick out one poster for my bedroom wall at home. I could have chosen a print of L’Étoile, Degas’s rendition of a beautiful, blushing ballerina, dancing in the spotlight with a look of ecstasy on her face, or of Deux danseuses sur scène, in which two delicate women pose prettily en pointe. But I knew which one I wanted; it wasn’t even close. La classe de danse (1874) captivated me.
At first, it was beauty that drew me in: the dolled-up dancers, the flurry of puffy tutus and flowers in dark hair. But the more I looked, the more layers of complexity revealed themselves: the ambiguous profile of the portly ballet master. The anxious look on the dancing girl’s face, her expression hidden by lipstick and rouge.
I step back, take in the whole busy scene. A girl in a pink sash performs an arabesque while a dozen other pupils wait their turn, warming up or gossiping in the back. One girl massages her neck; another fixes her costume in the mirror. The competition is tangible: the dancing girl is under close observation. One of her classmates watches with both hands on her hips, as though reluctantly impressed; another bites her fingernails, as though unsure if she can measure up. But there’s no doubt as to whose opinion matters, or who is at the center of the girls’ orbit. Students and their mothers are packed into the corners of the room, but a wide swath of empty space surrounds the ballet master: no one dares infringe. He has gray hair and a matching gray suit, a ruddy and unreadable face. He leans on a heavy wooden cane. Power, and the possibility of violence, cling to him: Does he use his walking stick to keep time, or to strike his students’ turned-in legs?
It wasn’t until I returned to the Met as an adult that I realized La classe de danse was not the only Degas painting that featured a man. As a child, I had been fixated on the women, their frilly tutus and their glamour. So I was surprised to see—lurking around the edges of many of the paintings I had loved—dozens of dark, unmistakably masculine figures. Men in top hats—some without faces, like figures from a bad dream—hovered in the shadows or in the wings, slovenly and menacing. As soon as I noticed them, they were all I could see; I wondered how I had ever looked at these scenes and seen anything else. I was an adult, too, when I learned about the life of Marie van Goethem, the muse for the Little Dancer sculpture I’d always loved. I read Camille Laurens’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and learned how, as a Parisian ballet student, Marie earned extra money for her family by posing for artists; how she was expelled from the Opera when these sittings interfered with her rehearsals. (The dancers were known as petits rats de l’opéra, or “little rats,” according to the nineteenth-century poet Théopile Gautier, because of their small size and their “gnawing and destructive tendencies.”) I read about how Degas gave her features associated with immorality and the lower class (high cheekbones, thick hair) and how she was ridiculed when the sculpture was first exhibited in a Paris salon. About how she was called ugly and sickly and depraved; how she was likened to a criminal and an ape. One revolted critic wrote that she had “a face marked with the hateful promise of every vice.” I had always thought she was pretty.
I learned, too, about how those men on the sidelines of Degas’s paintings had real-life counterparts in the rich men who scouted for lovers and prostitutes among the fresh-faced young girls at the Opera. And how the girls’ mothers would often act as pimps, arranging the sale of their own daughters. (When Marie van Goethem was born, the age of consent in France was thirteen; it had recently been raised from eleven.) But I already knew that, although women in ballet may be center stage, dangerous men are loitering just behind the scenes.
Girls and women made up the vast majority of students and dancers, but at every level, men had the upper hand. In the classroom, boys were scarce and therefore favored. The School of American Ballet awarded them automatic scholarships, while girls owed several thousand dollars in annual tuition. Male dancers were three times as likely to find a full-time job in a company, according to Advice for Dancers, by the psychologist and former New York City Ballet member Linda Hamilton. Men were the all-powerful directors, the vaunted choreographers. From 2018 to 2020, according to the Dance Data Project, men choreographed eighty percent of the work performed by America’s fifty largest companies. And as recently as 2016, all fifty-eight of the pieces on New York City Ballet’s program were made by men. Our bodies were instruments and they belonged to other people: to choreographers and partners and directors—to men.
Girls are trained not to create new work but to join the corps de ballet, the ensemble where all professionals get their start, and where the majority spend their whole careers. The corps is the backbone of the ballet: the low-ranking women who play the anonymous snowflakes, flowers, peasants, and swans. (Though men, too, pass through the corps, most of the iconic corps roles—the shades of La Bayadère, the swans of Swan Lake—are for groups of women. Men are more readily promoted; they stand out without trying.) “The rule is if we don’t notice you, you’re doing a good job,” says the ballet mistress of England’s Royal Ballet. Before a dancer can be considered for solo roles, she must first succeed at blending in—a humbling rite of passage. (The American Ballet Theatre dancer Devon Teuscher told Pointe about the whiplash she experienced after being promoted to principal; about how alien it felt to be asked for her opinion. “I remember starting to work on Swan Lake, and my coach, Irina Kolpakova, asked, What do you want to do at this moment? And I was like, What do you mean? You tell me what to do!”) To succeed in the corps takes tremendous discipline and reserve. There is no room for argument or interpretation. The dancer must forgo her own artistic flourishes—her individuality, her ego—for the sake of moving as one. A single foot out of line, a tendu a breath too soon, can ruin the effect. She must put her trust in the choreographer and his vision. But the result, when it works, is breathtaking. Some of the most memorable scenes in the ballet canon are not solos or pas de deux but the extravagant beauty of dozens of women dancing—the haunted Willis orbiting Giselle’s fresh grave; the fuchsia flowers waltzing through The Nutcracker’s Land of Sweets. It’s hardly surprising that women raised in this world shy away from choreographing—from telling others what to do. That they find it more natural to take direction.
* * *
I was twelve years old and had never so much as held hands with a boy. At middle school dances, I huddled with my girlfriends, studiously avoiding eye contact—let alone actual contact—with the opposite sex.
And now I was standing on the side of the studio, my time running out in four-beat increments. The middle-aged pianist in the corner, who had no doubt seen this ritual a hundred times, tapped out the bars of some generic tune. I looked at my partner, assigned based on our heights—a reedy, dark-haired boy in the standard uniform of black tights and a white T-shirt. I had never spoken to him before. His hand was wrapped around another girl’s waist as she held an arabesque en pointe.
The girls outnumbered the boys five to one, so we shared them, rotating in and out while they kept dancing. When the exercise ended, my rival ran off gracefully and I ran in, taking her place. I wondered who was sweatier, who was prettier, who he preferred. I was too shy to look directly at my partner, and, mercifully, the choreography did not require it. I arranged my feet in fifth position with my back to him, relevé’d onto pointe, and felt a pair of strong hands on my waist. For the first time in my life, I could turn not just two but three, four, five pirouettes. All I had to do was balance, secure in the knowledge that he would lend me momentum and catch me if I fell. When I reached the highest point of a jump, he lifted me another three feet; it was the closest I had ever come to flying. Then the music ended, I ran off to the side, and another girl stepped in. I had never felt so ecstatic, or so replaceable.
The first time I danced with a boy in real life—a couple years later, in my middle school gym—was fumbling and chaotic. Whose hands went where? What was I supposed to say? Who was meant to initiate, to lead?
The dynamics of classical pas de deux, meanwhile, were clear. “The women were fillies and the men were jockeys,” Edward Villella wrote in his memoir, Prodigal Son. “During the pas de deux I felt I was holding the reins, leading the ballerina through her paces, directing her movements around a track.” The woman is the ornament; the man is in control. He lifts her up and sets her down, spins her around while she silently poses. The very act of rising onto pointe renders the woman precarious: perched on her toes, she is “far easier and lighter to manipulate . . . as well as being appropriately vulnerable and dependent upon our male support,” as Toni Bentley put it in a 1983 article for Rolling Stone. I sensed, on some level, that it was too easy—that I was giving up on something—but still, I took comfort in the choreography, in the prescribed nature of our roles.
I have sometimes wondered, in my post-ballet life, if I have replicated that dynamic—if I internalized the doctrine of passivity, and if it affected my relationships. For more than a year in my early twenties, I was involved with a man I never called first. No matter what I wanted to say—no matter if I was bored or upset or just wanted to chat—I waited. Meanwhile, after months of interning—running errands, sorting mail, and writing late at night—I landed my first real job at a magazine. My articles were picked up; my bosses praised me, as did strangers online. But the confidence I was developing at work had no bearing on my behavior in private.
When I began reading about Margot Fonteyn, I squirmed with recognition. On one level—the level on which she was an ultraglamorous superstar—she was entirely unrelatable. But on another, her story felt strangely familiar.
In the 1940s and ’50s, Margot Fonteyn helped to elevate English ballet from a minor diversion, on par with the circus, to a mainstay of British culture, with fans in the Palace and a permanent home in Covent Garden. Her foreign tours did so much to restore England’s postwar reputation that, in 1956, Queen Elizabeth anointed her a dame. When Margot danced in New York, her admirers camped out overnight, sleeping in the subway station to be closer to the box office at Lincoln Center. Most ballet dancers are lucky to extend their careers into their midthirties; Margot celebrated her sixtieth birthday by starring in a new ballet. Her strength and tenacity as a dancer are legend.
