Reading Roundup: Pointe-ed Criticism

Georgina Pazcoguin dances Scala (with Sara Mearnes in background) in Ocean’s Kingdom at New York City Ballet, 2012.

Like many little girls, I went through a ballet phase. It didn’t last too long—I had no patience for the rigorous training, and I feel much more fulfilled by art forms that involve personal, verbal expression—but a bit of fascination with ballet aesthetics has lingered with me through adulthood. Last year, I went semi-viral on Twitter for suggesting you should wear ballet slippers around the house if you want a cheap way to feel glamorous! And this year, I read two recent books, both by women close to my own age, that look in-depth at contemporary ballet culture and systematically expose the ways that it fails and exploits women and people of color. I very much enjoyed both Swan Dive by Georgina Pazcoguin and Turning Pointe by Chloe Angyal, but they also made me very grateful that I turned out not to have the body or the patience or the passion to go further with ballet training than I did.

Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina by Georgina Pazcoguin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Georgina Pazcoguin has said that her goal for her memoir Swan Dive was to do for ballet what Anthony Bourdain did for restaurant cooking in Kitchen Confidential … and I can totally see that! Both books pull back the curtain on what it’s really like to work in a physically demanding, perfection-obsessed profession that is in the midst of a reckoning with its patriarchal and Eurocentric roots. More importantly for readers, both Bourdain and Pazcoguin have funny, frank, and extremely compelling voices.

It’s not necessarily that Pazcoguin presents shocking revelations, more that she has a knack for picking out the specific details that make her stories come alive. For instance, it is not news that ballet promotes some pretty messed-up ideas about body image, which dancers then internalize. But that really hits home when Pazcoguin describes the difficulty of enjoying Thanksgiving dinner knowing that the next day, she will have to put on a midriff-baring costume and dance “Coffee” in the year’s first performance of The Nutcracker. (And after that, there are nearly 50 more Nutcracker performances over the next 6 weeks! No wonder she refers to it as “the Nutbuster.”)

Or, take the issue of racism and microaggressions. Pazcoguin is the first Asian-American female soloist at New York City Ballet, and her dancing has met much success and acclaim. She is also the only NYCB female soloist who’s never gotten to dance the Sugar Plum Fairy—and that kind of says it all, right?

The book also pays plenty of attention to ballet’s sexism: during the #MeToo movement of 2017, NYCB artistic director Peter Martins was accused of assault and forced out. At this point, Martins had been Pazcoguin’s boss for about half her life (she came to NYCB as a teenager circa 2000) and we see her grapple with the complex emotions that arose when she had to admit to herself that she’d spent decades trying to please an abuser. Poignantly, I got the sense that, for legal reasons, she could not be as honest as she wanted to be: every time she mentions Martins being abusive, there’s a footnote acknowledging that he has denied any misconduct.

I do think this book has the same problem that Kitchen Confidential has: a mildly confusing structure. Swan Dive is semi-chronological, but its chapters are arranged more according to theme than according to a strict timeline—so I sometimes had trouble figuring out when exactly certain things happened in the context of Pazcoguin’s ballet career. Still, I think I enjoyed this even more than Bourdain’s book, and I think I know why: Bourdain’s memoir is about a man learning to hold his own in the macho world of restaurant cooking, while Pazcoguin’s is about a mixed-race woman learning to stand up for herself in a profession that has big problems with women who aren’t skinny and silent and compliant.

Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Turning Pointe is the second book I have read that came out in 2021 and illuminates the institutional rot at the heart of American ballet culture. The two books work very well together: Georgina Pazcoguin’s Swan Dive is an energetic, outspoken memoir, while this book is a sober, methodical collection of facts that reinforce all of Pazcoguin’s anecdotes. (Pazcoguin is also quoted a few times in this book, one of the many ballet students and professionals that Chloe Angyal interviewed as part of her research.) It maybe wasn’t quite as fun a read as the memoir was, but it’s very valuable to have a trained journalist lay out all of this information.

Each chapter of Turning Pointe covers a different problem with ballet culture: racism, sexism, fatphobia, low pay, rigid hierarchies. One of the most interesting sections was about the injuries ballet dancers are prone to; obviously I knew that dancing on pointe isn’t healthy for feet, but I never knew that dancers also frequently have problems with their hips and their pelvic floors.

Now I just wish that a journalist like Angyal would do something similar for my own chosen artform of theater, which has many of these same problems, though perhaps in a less blatant way. But, like ballet classes, acting classes often don’t have many male students, which results in boys being coddled while girls are ignored. And theater is also reckoning with the issue of how to respect “canonical” works and institutional memory, while also making room for the many female, POC, and/or LGBTQ artists who are skeptical of entrenched attitudes and want to express themselves in new ways using this old artform. There is so much going on behind the scenes, and I’m grateful to Angyal for drawing back the curtain.