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

by Alice Robb

Ballet does not exist in a vacuum. It is a laboratory of femaleness—a test-tube world in the middle of modern New York or London or Paris in which traditional femininity is exaggerated. The traits ballet takes to an extreme—the beauty, the thinness, the stoicism and silence and submission—are valued in girls and women everywhere. By excavating the psyche of a dancer, we can understand the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today.

Our bodies were instruments and they belonged to other people: to choreographers and partners and directors—to men.

Ballet attracts children who are already prone to perfectionism—who would rather repeat the same small movements over and over than play in the sandbox or run after a ball—then trains them to “self-correct”: to look in the mirror and scan for flaws.

I remember the first time I was in a house free of mirrors: at my grandfather’s shiva, when I was ten. The mirrors in the house had been covered in accordance with Jewish custom, and I remember how jarring it was to look for my reflection and not find it. It took a while to lose the habit of looking in those mirrors. I would go to the bathroom and be surprised, and then relieved, to see a dark cloth instead of my own imperfect face. I felt that I’d been somehow absolved of responsibility for my appearance. For a few, precious hours, I almost forgot about how I looked.

Pain is the body’s warning system: nature’s request that we stop what we are doing. But from an early age, dancers are inducted into a perverse relationship with pain. It isn’t a sign that the body is under stress; it’s a source of pride, a sign of progress—something to be ignored, if not outright relished.