When Alice Robb was little, she wanted more than anything to be a ballet dancer. After two rejections from the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the prestigious New York City Ballet, she finally won a place at the age of nine, a few days after 9/11. “The city was in mourning but it was the best day of my life,” she recalls in Don’t Think, Dear. Ballet became Robb’s obsession and her identity, though her dream of turning professional unravelled when she reached puberty. Her hips widened, she grew tall and her teachers began to ignore her in class. She started bunking off lessons and, in 2004, was finally expelled. Robb subsequently finished high school, went to college and embarked on a successful career as a science writer and journalist. But, she notes: “I couldn’t unlearn the values of ballet.”
Those values, which include discipline, stoicism, submission and near starvation, are put under the microscope in Don’t Think, Dear, which examines ballet through a feminist lens. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, the book weaves her early experiences as a dancer with those of her contemporaries, and of famous ballerinas, among them Margot Fonteyn, Anna Pavlova, Darci Kistler and Misty Copeland. The title is a nod to the late George Balanchine, the hallowed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, who championed the image of the ballerina as a willowy waif, and who Robb amusingly calls “my problematic fave”. A Russian émigré in America, Balanchine’s dictum was: “Don’t think, dear. Just do.” He was, by all accounts, a control freak and a bully, demanding impossible standards from his charges, and seeking to control how they looked, what they ate, who they dated and even what perfume they wore. He had sexual relationships with multiple dancers; those who rejected him often paid for it with their careers. Carol Sumner, a Balanchine protege, tells Robb: “He was very grabby. He was always wanting the girls. He’d be arrested by now.” Sumner, who is in her 80s, says this with laughter rather than disapproval. She still regards Balanchine as a hero.
Out of Robb’s childhood cohort, only one girl made it as far as the New York City Ballet. The rate of young dancers turning their passion into a profession is staggeringly low, though that doesn’t stop scores of little girls, and their parents, dreaming of a future in ballet. All this, despite the prohibitive cost of training, the punishing schedules, the bleeding feet and the fanatical calorie-counting at a time when most dancers’ bodies are still growing. Robb’s reports of young women subsisting on – and this is just one example – four tablespoons of cottage cheese and a single apple a day make for grim reading; so too the accounts of teenagers given “fat talks” by their superiors. For one, the instructions to “lengthen” and “tone up” only stopped when she developed an intestinal problem that prevented her from eating solid food.
The book arrives on the heels of 2021’s Swan Dive, in which the soloist Georgina Pazcoguin blew the whistle on the sexual harassment, disordered eating and body-shaming experienced by dancers at the New York City Ballet. Like Swan Dive, Don’t Think Dear is powered by a fundamental love of the art form while exposing the toxic culture that runs through it. Robb may look fondly back at her ballet years but she can’t deny the intrinsic weirdness of 21st-century women willingly submitting themselves to a life of physical and psychological torment, conceived of and often enforced by men, for a picture-book fantasy of femininity. While, in her final chapter, she finds green shoots of optimism in a production of Swan Lake that features gender nonconforming and Black dancers, the sense remains that, to be successful in their profession, ballet dancers must sacrifice their bodies and their agency. Most troubling of all is that, for many, it is a price worth paying.
Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet by Alice Robb is published by Oneworld (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
