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

Alice Robb
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: February 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780861547333
304 pages
Country of publication: United Kingdom

£10.99

Can ballet ever be reconciled with feminist ideals?

‘Beautiful, difficult, and compelling.’ VANITY FAIR

‘Don’t think, dear,’ said Balanchine. ‘Just do.’

For centuries, being a ballerina has been synonymous with being beautiful, thin, obedient and feminine. It is the crucible of womanhood, together with the harassment, physical abuse and eating disorders endemic at top schools. Can we abide this in a post #MeToo world?

Weaving together her own time at America’s most elite ballet school with the lives of renowned ballerinas throughout history, Alice Robb interrogates what it means to perform ballet today. She confronts the all-consuming nature of the form: the obsessive and dangerous practices to perfect the body, the embrace of submission and the idealisation of suffering.

Yet ballet also gifts its dancers ‘brains in their toes’, a way to fully inhabit their bodies and a sanctuary of control away from the pressures of the outside world. Perhaps it is time to reimagine its liberating potential.

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