I recently went to look at the pointe shoes of the ballerina Emma Livry, who danced at the Paris Opera from 1858 to 1862. Today’s pointe shoes are constructed around a box cushioning the toes. But Livry was dancing before this invention. Her shoes were in fact satin slippers, which she sewed around the sole with hundreds of stitches fanning outward in concentric circles; nothing else protected her. When I saw them, my toes curled under in instinctive pain.
Passed down from a time that allowed women few professional options (sewing would have been one of them), Livry’s shoes not only reveal the discipline she imposed on herself but an ambition—a determination to do and be more, a refusal to accept the givens of society and her allotted place within it.
In Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet, Alice Robb, a former staff writer at The New Republic, shows how intensely a ballerina’s training revolves around antiquated ideals of femininity—a femininity for which she is expected to suffer in silence. She draws from a breathtaking 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 depictions of the art form.
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