Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet

by Alice Robb

Balanchine scoffed at critics’ attempts to “understand” his ballets, insisting that they were meant only to be appreciated for their beauty. “When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don’t demand of them, ‘What do you mean? What is your significance?’” he said. “A flower doesn’t tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing.”

In another, it is a tragic romance: two people, drawn inexorably to each other, doomed to express their love only through art.

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.)

In the early 2000s, the sex predator Jeffrey Epstein scouted for victims at New York ballet schools,

And there were always flaws, not only in our dancing—the feet could be more pointed, the hips more turned out, the movement more fluid—but in our bodies: the beauty standards of ballet are rigid. A woman is expected not only to be rail-thin, but to have a specific set of features no diet can change, including narrow (or nonexistent) hips, a small head, and a short torso atop long legs.

the force of balancing en pointe on one foot is equivalent to letting the full weight of a grand piano fall on a single toe.

Our modern lifestyle allows for an unprecedentedly disembodied existence. We spend our days hunched over the computer, moving only our fingertips, ignoring our bodies until our limbs go numb.

When we work out as adults, it’s as compartmentalized, often, as it was in gym class: a YouTube yoga session between Zoom calls; a quick run and then back to the desk. (That is,

if we do it at all: more people than ever—an estimated 50 million Americans, according to the American Psychological Association—are considered entirely sedentary.)

“Aspirationally dead inside

feminism,” she called it. “The smartest women I know are all dissociating.”

rumor held that vigorous exercise could even cause a woman’s uterus to fall out.

“Interoception” is the sense of our own internal states—our awareness of the physical signals that

travel from body to brain, telling us when it’s time to eat or drink or empty our bladder.