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Beyond the Exaltation of the Individual Dancer | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review

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Alice Courtright is a poet, writer, and Episcopal priest. She studied theology and literature at Yale University, Cambridge University, and Sewanee's School of Theology. Her work has appeared in Mockingbird, SAGE, and other publications. “Communicating with an art form means being vulnerable. Being imperfect. And most of the time this is much more interesting.”—Mikhail Baryshnikov In Alice Robb’s 2023 memoir, On Loving and Leaving Ballet, she asks why elite dancers embrace the pain that ballet training requires and “suffer in silence.” Why did she? Robb writes, “We learned to dissociate the look on our face from the ache in our feet, to always keep our expression regal, serene.” She goes to a performance at the New York City Ballet and watches some young dancers in the audience, enrapt. She recognizes the desire “in their eyes—the yearning to be just like the women on stage.” To be, as one dancer put it, “one of the chosen ones.” The promise of individual glory, Robb suggests, among ot

"Communicating with an art form means being vulnerable. Being imperfect. And most of the time this is much more interesting."-Mikhail Baryshnikov In Alice Robb's 2023 memoir, On Loving and Leaving Ballet , she asks why elite dancers embrace the pain that ballet training requires and "suffer in silence." Why did she? Robb writes, "We learned to dissociate the look on our face from the ache in our feet, to always keep our expression regal, serene." She goes to a performance at the New York City Ballet and watches some young dancers in the audience, enrapt. She recognizes the desire "in their eye

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