I cannot consider my illness outside a framework of cost. As a teenager, I thought illness and injury were the “cost” of ballet—to me, it seemed that transcendence and performance would require physical sacrifice. Balletic practice is also fraught with dualities—man/woman, good/evil—without which the notion of balletic beauty might crumble. New York City Ballet founding partner Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his 1984 essay “Beliefs of a Master” that ballet dancers must strive to be otherworldly and that “Balanchine’s ballets can be read as icons for the laity, should we grant dancers attributes of earthly angels”:

Moden and now postmodern dancers convince themselves and their annotators that minimal motion is as interesting to watch as to perform, at least to cult or coterie audiences in minimal spaces, clubs for companionship rather than frames for absolute skill. Minimal movement exploits a token idiom of natural motion: walk, turn, hop, run. Also, there is free-fall to the floor plus rolling and writhing. But angels don’t jerk or twitch, except for irony or accent: they seem to swim or fly . . . Angels are androgynous, lacking heavy bosoms and buttocks. Portraits of angels in mural or mosaic have slight physiognomic distinction one from another. There is a blessed lack of “personality” in their stance against the skies. But this aerial or ethereal positioning grants them a special grace or magic in accepted service. Ballerinas are kin to those mythic Amazons who sliced off a breast to shoot arrows the more efficiently.

Trying to explain the appeal of ballet means resorting to such mythology and abstraction.

Balanchine positioned women as muses: “Ballet is woman,” he famously proclaimed. “God made men to sing the praises of women. They aren’t equal to men; they are better.” Indeed, what makes Balanchine’s choreography so magical is the agency with which the female roles are danced. The women are powerful, beautiful, larger-than-life muses whom men admire and serve. The appeal is not unlike the wordless tales told by the photographs of the hysterics. So often, the idealization of women acts as a means of their diminishment.

The impeachable character of the genius male artist is among the most prevalent motifs in ballet mythology, alongside the notion that serving ballet (for a woman) means refuting real life—forgoing health, higher education, financial stability, a social life, love, family. These sacrifices do not seem natural to me now; they seem like egregious labor issues. In the classic 1948 dance film The Red Shoes, Lermontov, the company impresario, warns, “A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer—never.” Vicky, his star dancer, falls in love with another dancer, Julian, and keeps their relationship a secret from Lermontov. No matter: Lermontov learns of the partnership and fires Julian, and Vicky leaves the company with him. When Lermontov coerces her back for a revival performance, both men contend for her, and she is caught between her love for Julian and her need to dance. She chooses the latter, and serving Lermontov is conflated with serving ballet itself. Loss of love is but another “cost” of dance, and the “balletic male genius’s” mistreatment of female dancers only adds to the mystique surrounding him.

When I first met my friend Toni Bentley, a former Balanchine dancer turned writer, she showed me her right hip bone rolling around in a box hand-painted by Mr. B. himself, next to her last pair of pointe shoes; the bone had had to be replaced after she developed osteoarthritis in her early twenties, the cost of her labor. In 1982, Toni published a striking, unflinching memoir—the first tell-all of its kind in the American ballet world—of NYCB’s winter 1980 season, when she was only twenty-two. Already she sensed that, despite her profound ambition and talent, her career might end right where she was: in the corps. Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal foretells the writer she would become—concerned with masochism, corporeality, impossible beauty, ruin, and release, her tendency to think too much to be a dancer. The book has been aptly lauded as a testament to the company, to Balanchine, and to the extreme lives of dancers. Kirstein wrote to Toni years later that she had written “the best book on our company, and . . . painted the best portrait of Balanchine that exists”—but it is also an incredible document of the labor issues of the era. In it, Toni documents the yearlong negotiations between NYCB management and the NYCB union, the American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA). During this time, the dancers were working without a contract:

If a dancer speaks, it must have value. What I’m trying to say is that we are all grossly ignorant of money matters, our rights, and even what we can and should demand—but we try. We attempt to explain to these men our perverse and unique situation. We are under the dictatorship of one man, whom we adore and respect, and his every whim is our law, no questions asked.

A union? A democracy under a dictator? We have no power to strike, really. Who would do that to our god?

To negotiate the terms of one’s contract was to negotiate the value of Balanchine himself. Balanchine guilted the dancers for the union’s strike for a living wage, reminding them that he and his peers had slept on the floor as starving young dancers. Toni wrote that she felt “cheated of a time of suffering such as Mr. B. had. We have had no opportunity to starve and work and live on the edge. We starve ourselves only out of neurosis. We are spoiled.”

Is it possible to untangle abjection and asceticism from labor? Even today, the commodification and exploitation of dancers is discussed mainly as an issue of emotional or physical abuse or the cult of personality, but surely one need not write off Balanchine as a Svengali in order to argue that the conditions of late capitalism dictate what kind of artistry is possible for choreographers and dancers, just as they dictate the kind of learning environment I am able to offer my students. McCarren, in Dance Pathologies, suggests that Marx’s redefinition of physical labor as “physical expenditure” helped facilitate the disconnection of dance from Foucault’s idea of désœuvrement: the absence of work that defined madness in the nineteenth century. Because dance is work and performance and art, it cannot be désœuvrement—according to Foucault, “Where there is a work of art, there is no madness.”

Toni comes to think of her deprivation of a life outside the ballet world differently later in the book, in a passage written on her twenty-third birthday: “I think I’ve discovered my problem—not the cure, but the problem. It is not dancing that has been making me miserable, it is what dancing does not allow that I’ve missed . . . I am starved for people, life, thoughts, conversation, alternatives to my NYCB world. I need only a few hours out in the real world to return joyful and by choice to my tendus.” Still, she suspected, her days in ballet were numbered. A few pages later, in a passage that could have been lifted from my despondent teenage diaries, she writes, “The eternal struggle—to give in to one’s weakness, or disregard it and forge ahead. I’ve always chosen the second, and the weaknesses vanished. Now they have emerged stronger than ever.”

In The Red Shoes, when Lermontov asks Vicky why she wants to dance, she responds by asking him, “Why do you want to live?” Now, revisiting the memoirs and autobiographies of the dancers I admired as a child, I notice that while most do not conceive of balletic labor as specifically as Toni—and all are in agreement that they do not dance only for a living but also to live—these women have certainly been warning one another of the cultural conditions of the ballet world all along. Like many young dancers, I devoured former NYCB principal Gelsey Kirkland’s 1986 autobiography, Dancing on My Grave, which chronicles her rise from star student to principal dancer, her drug addiction and physical deterioration, and the pitfalls of being locked into Balanchine’s closed system of instruction. I first read the book between classes in the crumbling building of my ballet school, breathing the characteristic scent of rosin, sweat, and Jet glue while the other girls stretched and tittered as the boys struggled to balance in their pointe shoes. For many, these interactions were their earliest flirtations, branded by the slightest betrayal of the strict balletic gender divide: women wear pointe shoes, extending their limbs to their most lengthened iteration; men lift the women up. Kirkland’s suggestion that “ballet seemed infinitely preferable to the kind of romantic exchange valued by my peers” had deeply resonated with me: How could the other students see their childish dalliances as worthwhile when we were learning the highest, most soulful art form? If they had enough desire left over for anything else, did they really love ballet all that much? I think of this young girl often: how the ideals of ballet might create hardship when she gets around to untangling her sexuality from dance—if she is able to. My tattered copy of Kirkland’s book is long lost, so I checked out a copy from the library. In the margin of one page, as if to prepare for an interview with the writer, a previous borrower had written: “Ask why she’s so obsessed w/ him” (as though the book were not partially an attempt by Kirkland to figure this out for herself). Some of the book’s most potent passages are when Kirkland recalls objectifying Balanchine, perhaps because they are the sole moments when believing in his magic does not come at her expense: “I developed the habit of mentally undressing him, without any attraction, simply fascinated to know if he possessed all the attributes of the male anatomy. In an effort to rationalize the idle speculation about his sexual inadequacy, I told myself that when God gave out genius, the other areas might be slighted, like a blessing withheld. I never considered the possibility that Balanchine’s genius and sexuality might be aberrations.”

The line between the male genius (Toni Bentley’s Balanchine, whom I am admittedly partial to) and the tyrant (Gelsey Kirkland’s Balanchine) is seldom clear. Contemporary depictions of Doctor Charcot often depict him somewhere between a sexist, authoritarian sadist who slept with his patients and someone a bit too keen to document the hysterics’ fantastically visual, sexualized symptoms. Swedish doctor and psychiatrist Axel Munthe, who had been a medical student of Charcot’s, writes in his autobiographical novel, The Story of San Michele, about Charcot’s methods as fraudulent and scientifically unsound. Munthe’s hostility toward Charcot likely originated from an incident in which Munthe helped a patient escape from the ward of the hospital and brought her to his home. Charcot threatened to report him to the police and said that he would not be allowed in the Salpêtrière again.

The story reveals little about Charcot’s true nature. What it does reveal is that some of the women did not believe that the treatments offered at the Salpêtrière were helping their condition. Some of them surely refused to be hypnotized, as Augustine had. Some of them desperately wanted to leave.