Ballet Makes Fools of Us All By Katherine Quaranta

They’re Going to Love You

I spent the first 22 years of my life in rigorous ballet training. I don't read books about ballet. But my friend Maddie really wanted me to like this one… I did.

Meg Howrey’s They’re Going to Love You follows aspiring ballerina Carlisle’s complicated relationship with her family, her art, and the ways in which the two intersect. Born to a Balanchine dancer Isabel, and dancer turned director Robert, ballet permeated Carlisle's life from all angles. When her father falls in love with James, a male ballet dancer, Isabel takes daughter Carlisle back to Ohio. In her teens, spending the summer with her father and James in New York, Carlisle receives an education not only in ballet, but life itself; receiving lessons of love and loss during the AIDS crisis of the 80s. Now an adult, having received news her father is dying, Carlisle reckons with her past, ballet the connecting thread in all the versions of herself we come to know. More than just a book about dance, it’s a story of expectation, failures, passions that can’t love you back, and heartbreak in all its forms. 

There are pockets throughout where Howrey drops a sentence about ballet that makes my breath catch. Something stunningly true, in such simple language, weighty despite its tone. This being what I enjoyed so much about this work; the ways it put words to feelings I couldn't, or wasn’t willing to. It felt like Howrey sat with these experiences and compiled them so I didn't have to. They’re Going to Love You felt like a conversation. Howrey imparts simple wisdom that encapsulates years of complex feelings. Reading was like revisiting an old friend in a way that felt close enough, accurate enough (something seriously lacking in most media with ballet as a focal point), without the possibility of getting hurt again. As I made my way through the story, I was inching closer to something that once gave meaning to my days. 

The book opens on James’ teaching. He emphasizes to his dancers the idea of “containment”. Often in class, a phrase is repeated as dancers’ guides to movement. Here, James is calling on his students to keep the top half of their body stoic, unmoving despite the work their legs are doing. More than just a mantra, containment speaks to broader ideas about ballet. To the complexities in every dancer, the dichotomy of the art form. How, even though ballet dancers perform massive feats of athleticism, they’re meant to look effortless. To make the impossible look easy is mastery. To contain the effort, to mask the challenge, is to succeed. Containment, synonymous with ballet, becomes Howrey's refrain. 

The language of They’re Going to Love You is precise and rhythmic, one part of the author’s artistic self spilling onto another – the page. More striking though, is that Howrey describes the act of feeling in a way only a dancer could. Not just heat in Carlisle's chest, but, “… a burning …, not in the heart but in the lungs, the ribs, spongy cartilage, bones.”  This ability to isolate, this specificity, this obsession to detail not only trains a ballet dancer, it breeds a vivid writer. Here, Carlisle notes every fiber she becomes aware of much like ballet dancers performing the simple act of a tendu – thinking of every part of the foot from heel to metatarsal to toe. 

Yet, this exquisite kinesthetic awareness can leave dancers lacking an emotional one. The over-saturation of how our body feels physically often leaves no room for considerations of the mind. There's a stiffness, an emotional stifling present in Carlisle’s family of dancers from the beginning. Emotions outside of the studio, those of the storybook characters they embodied, were placed on the back burner. What they could not, or would not say with words was, to me, a direct result of this issue. Being so proficient in this little world can render you impotent in the real one. 

Carlisle and her mother’s inability to speak explicitly and process the emotional traumas at the core of this book, coupled with their expertise in compartmentalization, is a product of their training. Only when Carlisle is working on a piece of choreography does the anger she harbored for years surface, movement rocking the boat. “I invent ways to break the formal beauty down, fall, crash. I can feel the risk of moving like this, summoning up anger I’ve been trying to ignore.” Her ability to channel frustrations into her work is priceless, but it can’t be the only way to feel or make sense of life’s challenges. And in Carlisle's case especially, when the people, the pain, and the art are so deeply intertwined, it can’t constantly be a place of refuge for the things one doesn’t want to acknowledge. When my training ended, I learned this lesson the hard way.  When the movement stopped, I had room to feel what it quelled. My ineptitude away from the barre, and how heavily I relied on it as an emotional outlet, was apparent. That “there might be undanceable truths” was a hard pill to swallow.

Devotion is a recurring theme of They’re Going to Love You. Howrey describes it as a “churchly focus.” Once the big leagues rejected me and I, in turn, abandoned ballet in any form, a lack of devotion (to anything) undid me completely. For so long, it was the undercurrent of my life. A place where my neuroticism felt productive, Contained. Ironically, though my place in its world wasn’t guaranteed, ballet was a constant. I knew I could come to the barre and everything would be the same. Ballet’s practices stand the test of time. They haven’t changed for hundreds of years. (Even the patterns in barre exercises are set, down to their direction and repetition; almost always in threes, perfectly uneven.) It felt good to have a driving force, a familiar and consistent goal to work toward. To have wild dreams that, for a moment, felt attainable. Good to have something that made my stomach burn, notwithstanding if it was with joy or dread. Good to have a drive that was quiet and strong like the art itself. 

I missed going to church. 

But I couldn't handle the fact that despite all of the work I'd done, it wasn’t enough. That there was nothing I could do to help the structure of my bones, how short I stood. Selfishly, I revered that something so beautiful could be so ruthless – until I wound up on the chopping block. 

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The title itself invokes a fact of ballet that led to my, Carlisle’s, and countless others’ rejection from dancing it professionally. It’s not you they’ll love. What they’ll love is your body, what it can do. The lines it will create, how far it can be pushed. The curvature in the right places, the absence of curves in others. Sure, they can love your dedication (obsession), your attitude (docile), or your work ethic (self-sacrificial), but that all won’t matter if the body these qualities inhabit isn’t right. Bitter remarks from a reject, sure, but it’s also the name of the game. The exclusivity, in this way, the truth that only a select few can make the cut is a major part of ballet’s prestige. You were either born for it or you weren’t. That the body often trumps the work underpins its mystique. 

“I’m loath to connect womanness with suffering, or suffering with greatness, but there it is.” No doubt this linking, by Carlisle, Howrey, both, shaped by years in ballet. It invokes the lessons on womanhood we learn after we’ve earned our first pair of pointe shoes; the excitement for a gift that will hurt us every time we use it. The bottom line to ignore pain, look beautiful despite it. My first period came a few days before my 15th birthday minutes before I had to go to class. I was talked through using a tampon by a friend, another girl that was once a ballerina, who leaned against the stall door. I pulled up my tights and danced for the rest of the evening. Not once considering rest for the change my body had just undergone. My only worry then was being late for class. Containment. Carlisle asks, “Will I be allowed then, to come apart? Will I have earned it?” One of those simple phrases I mentioned earlier, one that will strike only the members of this little club. Ballet teaches us that nothing comes for free. That everything, even a moment of vulnerability, must be earned, lest we look too emotional and unequipped for the job. “What makes an artist is what makes a woman.” To waver is to show a weakness that isn't afforded. 

*

James’ character affected me especially. Even with the piano, a hobby, he struggles with the after effects of training for a perfection that would never come. “I think he plays brilliantly and don’t understand what he means when he says he doesn’t. This is also a part of his theme, his reminiscences, a general sense of having come just short of greatness.” The need to be great at something, having failed in doing so at the one thing. The affliction that lives in dancers long after we’ve stopped practicing, the compulsions still seeping into everything we touch. The issue of greatness, having been in the studios with it, on stage with it, so close to it himself, wrecked James. Because, in the end, he had to watch the possibility of it pass him by. 

Later, when Carlisle stands in the back of a theatre watching Alex (a key player in her family’s severing) dance, I can feel what she feels. So can James. I haven’t been able to go see a performance yet because I know what my stomach will do. I'll enter the theater and know what it smells like backstage. Remember the times I sat by the fountain not just as an audience member, which anyone could be, but a member of the group making the show. The feeling of my backpack thumping against my back as I navigated the tunnels and parking garage that go to the stage door, the corridors that led to the dressing rooms where I put on costumes with the last names of the greats etched into the tags. I'll sit in those itchy red seats and think that this was never where I was supposed to be. I never thought I'd be doing the watching instead of the doing. 

At once, the greatest love and heartbreak of my life is ballet. 

But, cliché as it is, I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything. It made me who I am, and not in the obvious way of identifying as a dancer for the majority of my life. Rather, ballet taught me a discipline that can be found nowhere else. It provided me with an outlet, fleeting as it was. It taught me how to present myself, to stand straight, to search for eyes and look into them. To embrace what makes me unique, to use quirks as tools to stand out, get ahead. It instilled in me a deep sense of reverence, an engrained level of respect (that may or may not present as issues with authority). It taught me to appreciate stillness, to calm the mind by looking inward, to inhabit my body as more than just a vessel, but a powerful force with which I move through the world. Ballet fostered an intimate sisterhood, classmates understanding what so few others could. It introduced me to teachers that infused the studios with their love of dance, boundless knowledge, and care for their students – because after all, they were in our shoes once, too. They shared the same dreams we did, felt the same hunger. 

Though the end of my journey with ballet was painful, it was necessary. I’m grateful for every lesson I learned along the way, even when they felt senseless. I realize all the work I did was not for naught, after all. Training in ballet, despite the devastation it may sometimes incur, stays in us for the rest of our lives. With They’re Going To Love You, Howrey brilliantly demonstrates the undeniable ways dance weaves people together. With ears raised on the same melodies, internal metronomes exist in all of us, beating along with our hearts. As dancers, past or present, we’re all a part of the same tribe. We all worship a common faith.