When Alice Robb was little, she wanted more than anything to be a ballet dancer. After two rejections from the School of American Ballet, the feeder school for the prestigious New York City Ballet, she finally won a place at the age of nine, a few days after 9/11. “The city was in mourning but it was the best day of my life,” she recalls in Don’t Think, Dear. Ballet became Robb’s obsession and her identity, though her dream of turning professional unravelled when she reached puberty. Her hips widened, she grew tall and her teachers began to ignore her in class. She started bunking off lessons and, in 2004, was finally expelled. Robb subsequently finished high school, went to college and embarked on a successful career as a science writer and journalist. But, she notes: “I couldn’t unlearn the values of ballet.”
Those values, which include discipline, stoicism, submission and near starvation, are put under the microscope in Don’t Think, Dear, which examines ballet through a feminist lens. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, the book weaves her early experiences as a dancer with those of her contemporaries, and of famous ballerinas, among them Margot Fonteyn, Anna Pavlova, Darci Kistler and Misty Copeland. The title is a nod to the late George Balanchine, the hallowed choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet, who championed the image of the ballerina as a willowy waif, and who Robb amusingly calls “my problematic fave”. A Russian émigré in America, Balanchine’s dictum was: “Don’t think, dear. Just do.” He was, by all accounts, a control freak and a bully, demanding impossible standards from his charges, and seeking to control how they looked, what they ate, who they dated and even what perfume they wore. He had sexual relationships with multiple dancers; those who rejected him often paid for it with their careers. Carol Sumner, a Balanchine protege, tells Robb: “He was very grabby. He was always wanting the girls. He’d be arrested by now.” Sumner, who is in her 80s, says this with laughter rather than disapproval. She still regards Balanchine as a hero.
