Don't Think, Dear

‘Ballet is woman’ said George Balanchine, the founder of New York City Ballet.

For centuries, being a ballerina has been synonymous with being beautiful, obedient and feminine. The sexism seems built-in – and #MeToo rocked the ballet world with shocking revelations about harassment, physical abuse and eating disorders at top schools. But is there a different way of being a ballerina – a feminist one?

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

But ballet also gifts its practitioners ‘brains in their toes’, a way to fully inhabit their bodies and a sanctuary of control and routine away from the pressures of the outside world. Don’t Think Dear looks to figures like Misty Copeland and Alexandra Waterbury to carve out new paths for ballerinas.

The art of ballet can be reimagined. But should it be?

Author Biography

Alice Robb is the author of Why We Dream and a contributing writer for Women in the World, the website launched by Tina Brown in partnership with The New York Times.  From 2013 until early 2015 she was a staff writer at New Republic.  Since then she has been writing regularly for New Statesman and has also contributed to Foreign Policy, Elle, Vice, Bustle, Fusion, Vulture and The Cut. She lives in London.