Don’t Think, Dear by Alice Robb

by Kate · Published May 10, 2023 · Updated May 10, 2023

Alice Robb has created a fascinating, insightful journalistic exploration that I promise will hold your interest whether ballet appeals to you or not. I have never been a fan of ballet and, when I finally saw “The Nutcracker” I was a mom of two. I sat through the production only because I didn’t want to set a bad example for my kids and cut out early. It is a tribute to Alice Robb’s storytelling ability and incisive analysis that I loved reading “Don’t Think, Dear.”

In the Introduction, the author states that she was born in 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” a time of endless options, of girl power and optimism. Yet Alice Robb didn’t experience that in her youth. Instead, she was drawn to ballet with its strict codes and rules that hadn’t changed in decades. The author writes:

“Don’t think, dear,” one teacher liked to say, affecting a faint Russian accent as she repeated George Balanchine’s famous dictum. We couldn’t go to the water fountain or the bathroom without permission. At the end of class, we curtsied to our teachers and thanked them—the only time we were allowed to speak. [p. 7]

For Alice Robb, every part of ballet was welcomed; she wanted to be a ballerina from the time she was a small child. In 2001, when she was 9, Ms. Robb was accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet (SAB) after two previous rejections. “It was the best day of my life,” she acknowledges.

I didn’t care if dancers were obedient animals or ethereal fairies or powerful athletes: whatever they were, I wanted to be one, had wanted to as far back as I could remember. From the earliest toddler “ballet” lessons I was enrolled in, I lobbied my parents for more. My favorite part of those classes was not the reward at the end—when we were finally allowed to freestyle, to flap our arms and make believe we were butterflies or birds—but when we stood at the barre: when we were told what to do, and when it was hard. When I arranged my feet in that neat little V of first position and earned the pretty teacher’s praise. [p. 4]

Outside of the studio, I latched onto ballet as my identity. I wore my hair to school in a tight bun, and when I started needing a bra, I instead wore a leotard under my clothes. I relished my classmate’s gasps when I faux casually eased into a straddle split during gym class warm-ups, or when I bent all the way backward playing limbo at bar mitzvahs. [p. 7]

The author reflects on her complex feelings about ballet, femininity, and the female body. Her purpose for writing “Don’t Think, Dear,” stated at the end of the Introduction, is to investigate this “…laboratory of femaleness—a test-tube in the middle of modern New York or London or Paris in which traditional femininity is exaggerated. The traits ballet takes to the 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.” [p. 11]

Alice Robb never joined the ranks of professional ballet dancers, but even as an adult, she found she could not “unlearn the values of ballet.” She examines her SAB experiences alongside those of famous ballerinas, many of whom worked with SAB founder and unofficial patron saint, George Balanchine. Famous for bringing athleticism to ballet, he also exercised strict control over every aspect of his dancers’ lives. Ms. Robb’s account of his life in Chapter 1, titled “Mr. B,” is an excellent example of her ability to provide intimate portraits of legendary ballet heroes.

Born Georgi Balanchivadze in 1904 into an artistic, financially precarious family in St. Petersburg, the man who would one day revolutionize ballet was not, at first, interested in it at all. His father was a musician and his little brother would grow up to become a composer; his first love was piano. In 1913, his mother—hoping to set her children on a path toward a stable career and, one day, a pension—brought Georgi along to his sister Tamara’s audition for the prestigious, state-sponsored Imperial Ballet School. Tamara, who dreamed of becoming a dancer, failed the exam, but an official noticed her little brother and suggested he apply, too. Nine-year-old Georgi had never taken a ballet class, but based on the way he carried himself as he walked back and forth before a panel of judges, he was offered a place on the spot. [pp. 19-20]

His mother left him there at the ballet school and by his early teens, he had earned a reputation for challenging traditional ballet choreography. In 1917, civil war broke out and after seven years of barely living, he received permission to dance in Germany, and from there fled to Paris, defecting from the Soviet Union. He rose to the top of his profession, becoming ballet master at the Ballets Russes at the age of twenty-one and changing his name to George Balanchine. In 1933, he arrived in New York and co-founded The School of American Ballet, earning the reputation of a creative genius because of his innovative choreography. Named the “Balanchine technique” it “emphasized speed and energy, training dancers to perform off-balance steps and jazzy distortions” [p. 24]. In 1948, The School of American Ballet became the official ballet school of the New York City Ballet with Balanchine as its artistic director. He died in 1983 before Alice Robb attended The School of American Ballet but his techniques and treatment of his dancers live on. At the School of American Ballet, Balanchine is still “worshipped as a hero” [p. 41].

The blind passion of Balanchine’s true believers—their refusal to hear a word against him—sometimes made me wonder if I had spent my adolescence in thrall to a deceased cult leader. I’m not the first to think in those terms. One prominent dance critic blames the powerful “Balanchine cult” for the neglect of other brilliant twentieth-century choreographers, like Antony Tudor and Roland Petit, in American ballet. Undeniably, there was an element of magical thinking in the memoirs I read. “He was going to live forever—as he often told us,” wrote Farrell, “and I believed him as I believed everything else he said.” The language of faith and betrayal infused the day-to-day workings of NYCB with all the gravity of a religious mission. [pp. 35-36]

Not only does Alice Robb present intimate interviews with those who became professionals, she also provides compelling memories provided by her young ballet friends at SAB. We meet Lily, who came to school every day from Queens where she lived with her Hungarian immigrant parents.

We groomed each other like cats—sticking bobby pins in each other’s buns and helping each other stretch—and played jacks on the floor, a “Nutcracker” tradition that had been passed down for decades. [p. 15]

Another friend, Meiying Thai, first enrolled in gymnastics. She took up ballet as cross-training but auditioned for the School of American Ballet after seeing “The Nutcracker.” Meiying quickly rose to the top of the class and was so promising a pupil that Ms. Robb envied her. However, she struggled to advance to pointe work in her midteens and left SAB to become an artist working with a broad range of media. In an interview with the author, she admits that “ballet informs everything that I do. I take the romanticism of the ballet world and put that in my paintings” [p. 232].

Ms. Robb notes that: I see, in her work, the influence of Degas’s classroom scenes and Chagall’s stage sets, of Karinska’s costumes and Balanchine’s Land of Sweets. A pair of pointe shoes hangs in her studio beside her paintbrushes. Sometimes, she holds a brush against the canvas and lifts her arms in port de bras; her performance—which she captures on video—is as much a part of the work as the striking marks that appear on the canvas [p. 232].

Contrasting the idyllic description of ballet presented by some, the author presents a no-holds-barred examination of some of the issues of the art, among them body dysmorphia, eating disorders and masochism.

In 1987, in a paper bluntly titled “The Dancer as Masochist,” the Canadian psychologist Jock Abra compares the relationship between a dancer and her director to that of masochist and sadist. “To almost unmatched degree”, he wrote, dancers in a ballet company are “regulated by other people, by teachers, directors, choreographers, etc., and their arbitrary, capricious judgment …They do as they are told without complaining and virtually forgo personal responsibility or independence” [p. 93].

“From a young age,” Abra writes, ballet dancers are taught “to accept…external authority and discipline unquestioningly.” They conform to strict codes of dress, hairstyle, and makeup—no matter their preferences or natural proportions. As adults, their bodies become the passive site of the choreographer’s creative control—like “canvas for the painter” or “stone for the sculptor”. Dancers readily compare themselves to objects or tools. [p. 93]

Excessive “mirror gazing” and “mirror checking” are both occupational necessities for dancers and clinical features of body dysmorphic disorder. A woman named Louise, who was interviewed as part of a British Journal of Health Psychology study on body dysmorphia, admitted to having once gotten “stuck” in front of the mirror, unable to move—even to eat or drink—for eleven hours straight. Even as Louise knew that the longer she stared, “the more distorted everything becomes,” she couldn’t look away. The dysmorphic women were both tortured by mirrors and dependent on them. “I do feel kind of bereft if there are no mirrors,” said another woman. “I feel really like kind of an addict without their drug.” [p. 139]

The daughter of an economics professor and a former nurse, Ms. Robb attended SAB from age 9 through 12, when she was a student at Dalton, a private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. After she was dismissed from SAB in 2004, she refused to accept the verdict and applied to other ballet academies. After Boston Ballet School’s summer program turned her away, Ms. Robb quit for good at 15. She graduated from Brearley, an all-girls private school in Manhattan, and went on to study archaeology at Oxford University. Then she took an internship at The New Republic, eventually joining the magazine as a staff writer. She left the publication to write “Why We Dream,” a nonfiction book published in 2018 about the science of dreaming.

Amid the reexaminations of powerful men that came with the #MeToo movement, Ms. Robb started confronting how she felt about the rarefied world that she had witnessed as a girl. She was rattled when Peter Martins, Balanchine’s successor at the director of New York City Ballet resigned in 2018 after accusations surfaced that he had sexually harassed and abused dancers. (Mr. Martins denied the allegations.) Ms. Robb remembered his hulking figure walking into her classes to watch students while her teachers strained to make good impressions on him.

Driven by journalistic curiosity, Ms. Robb began investigating coverage of Mr. Martins’s 1992 arrest on suspicion of having assaulted his wife, the 28-year-old ballerina Darci Kistler. (Mr. Martins was then 45.) Ms. Kistler dropped the charges, however, and days later she arrived at the company to rehearse with Mr. Martins before dancing that evening. A City Ballet spokesman said at the time, “We see this as a personal matter.”

“That got me interested,” Ms. Robb said. “It was completely public that he’d gone to jail, but it was brushed under the rug. Now it’s shocking to read about when you go through old newspaper clips, but the sense among loyalists at the time was, ‘That’s their business.’ [cf. New York Times]

Published in 2023 by Mariner, Alice Robb’s book is a reflection on the way ballet dancers can be abused both as young students and as professionals. She draws from a remarkable range of sources to build her case, looking to the writings and anecdotes of dancers past and present (Megan Fairchild, Sophie Flack, and her old coach, Carol Sumner), medical and sociological studies, and pop-culture portrayals of the art form. She comprehensively explores the extent to which manipulation and mistreatment of the mind and body not only occur within the lives of ballet dancers but of athletes in general. She opens a window to so many questions about the culture of ballet but for me, the most important is: despite the patriarchal and misogynistic traditions that this art form is steeped in, can we make significant strides so that ballet becomes for young dancers a tool of female empowerment rather than of suppression and objectification? That’s a question I hope the author tackles in her next book which, like Don’t Think, Dear, I know will be extraordinary.

Check Amazon for more on this book I love.