A ballet career, however, is a gruelling one, and all dancers, particularly female ones, face the constant impossibility of fulfilling that dream. From a very young age and at each step along the way, we are picked out or cast aside; we are encouraged or not; given attention or ignored; we land our perfect role or our names are left off the cast lists. We must sacrifice everything for dance.

The constant sense of competition, the impossible physical standards and punishing hours can be a source of anxiety and distress. But here is the inherent contradiction: it is the dance — the movement, the music, the choreography — which is also a salve for these emotions.

Dance was the love of Alice Robb’s life, but then it abandoned her. In her new book, Don’t think dear: On loving and leaving ballet, she brings that sense of competition to life. She describes dance as though it were an abusive lover: one that consumed her every waking moment, her body, mind and soul, only to walk out on her. And she never quite recovered. Sadly, her focus in the book is on the leaving, not the staying.

Her choice of title rather gives the game away. It refers to the “genius of ballet” George Balanchine, who ruled the aesthetic of the US style of ballet for a long period and is still worshipped today. Balanchine created and adored the svelte, skinny lines of the modern ballerina. “In my ballets, women are first,” he would say. And he created astonishing roles for his chosen few. The irony was that he did this by exerting overwhelming control over women, always patronisingly commanding: “Don’t think dear!” In other words: do as you are told. Don’t question, don’t ask, don’t you dare to think.

There are distinct parallels, which Robb sketches out, between Balanchine’s behaviour and the abuses of the modern ballet masters during our #MeToo era. Balanchine’s muse Carol Sumner jokes how Mr B “was very grabby” and would “be arrested today”, yet insists she is “on Mr B’s side”. Her joking hides the brutal aesthetic Balanchine brought in: no dancer could ever be too thin. “I want to see bones,” he said. Dancer Gelsey Kirkland describes living with an eating disorder, the inevitable side effect of his “concentration camp aesthetic”.

There is a dark, parasitic corner of the ballet world that Robb began to be trapped within. The part which feeds off a female dancer’s insecurities over her size, her height and her weight — never mind her abilities as a dancer.

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My body will never be erased

By Rosie Kay

Robb talks at length about the pressures so many dancers feel to be the right shape. They are told to lengthen, to stretch out — all euphemisms for: “lose weight”. And she describes, brutally, how women at her school who outgrew the recommended size or could not sustain a well-below-average body weight would not make the cut. Reading, I wondered, was the same about to happen to her?

What really interests me in Robb’s account of dancing is how she exposes a dancer’s physical pain. And the central contradiction of that: what pain means in a world where women still punish themselves and their bodies, in a profession that values this punishment while also appearing to be the height of beauty, elegance and grace. From the descriptions of learning to deal with the pain of pointe shoes, which brought back vivid memories of pouring surgical spirit over raw toes, to what it feels like being man-handled by men from a young age, to the wonderful fact that the force of balancing en pointe is the equivalent to letting the full weight of a grand piano fall on a single toe. All the while she — we — learned never to scream or cry.

The pain of performing while sick, while injured, while heartbroken becomes part of the dancer’s legend. We immortalise and mythologise our worst moments. There was the time I performed with pneumonia, each breath rasping, but still got to the end (weeks in bed was my punishment but returning to work, I was praised for my skinny frame); or the time a physio told me he could not let me dance, but I did anyway, three weeks post full knee reconstruction. The sacrifice, the dying for your art that is part of the culture of dance, is not for the faint-hearted. Add to that a culture of disordered eating, and the pain and sacrifice only ends in tears.

We see that culture everywhere today. I understand how dance exerts its power over young women and appeals to their sense of pain, freedom and sacrifice. I see, too, how dance enables women to escape that sense of being trapped in an imperfect body. To truly be a great dancer one becomes more than one’s body.

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But while modern women navigate a world that is still so preoccupied with submission, compliance and pain, the female dancer, in Robb’s eyes, seems to at least be honest with their embrace of masochistic tendencies; they are able to accept that both physical and emotional pain is a prerequisite for dancing. So while we dancers suffer, we know we are doing it for a higher purpose. Robb’s assessment is that the modern woman is in denial. She is “post-wounded”, a term created by Leslie Jamison. She has adopted a stance of numbness or sarcasm. She “conducts herself as if pre-empting certain accusations: don’t cry too loud, don’t play victim, don’t act the old role all over again”. I can identify with this. The idea that no matter how awful, no matter how terrible or traumatic or painful an experience, a woman can never, ever “act the victim”.

But is this where modern feminism has brought us? To a place where we have to deny that we have struggled and suffered to take control of our lives and our bodies and the world we live in. In this post-wounded, post-vulnerable world, is it no longer acceptable to expose our pain? There is a generational difference here that Robb does hint at. It is sometimes only by exposing our pain as women that we can come together to say “no we need this — this is important to us”, which makes women of a post-wounded generation simply cringe and recoil. “We are not like the other women, we can handle our pain,” they say, a stance which might not be as helpful or progressive as they realise.

Missing from the book, tellingly perhaps, are the stories of women who have truly succeeded in dance, those who have found creative freedom and choice within these strict confines. This may be born of Robb’s relationship with the artform — she was not able to continue her career. Having rejected ballet and embraced modern dance, I was lucky enough to be inspired by a plethora of strong, independent and pioneering female artists, from Martha Graham and Doris Humphreys to Isadora Duncan and Pina Bausch. Women who created their own style, substance and companies, and gave life to their view of the world material through dance.

What about Robb? I was delighted by her description of the final moments of the dancer Anna Pavlova: her last words were “Get my swan costume ready”. The epitome of the show must go on. Then, in the next paragraph, Robb destroys her legacy, comparing Pavlova’s low legs and poor technique to that of a teenage amateur.

Did Robb miss out on female mentors along the way, I wondered? Was the gaze and award-giver only a man? Did she judge all other women by some impossible standards a man had bestowed on her? Where is the joy, I wondered. Was she never able to escape that bitterly critical voice inside herself and actually dance for her own reward?

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Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

It was this aspect of Robb’s examination — that of the somewhat expelled, rejected dancer which ended up being too strong for me. To be an independent voice, a female voice in dance, you need to have almost reached the point of giving up, and when you return, you play it by your own rules. That can be difficult to carry, and it can sometimes be lonely; you forge your own path, and by very definition you are no longer “the good girl”.

But Robb, the spurned dancer, can only hint at what she is still seeking. Comparing a ballet class to an exercise class, she laments the abstraction of the vocabulary of the gym compared with the beautiful vocabulary of ballet. In the gym you feel your “abs” and “quads”, in the studio you can be lifting your leg with an imaginary silver thread, expanding your arms like wings and being supported by the air around you. No mention of the muscles involved — simply an instruction and whisper of visual imagery and close attention to the detail of the movement.

This felt familiar: she knows the dancer’s world of imagination and visualisation, where we are free to conjure beauty and truth with our bodies. Deep down, Robb understands that dancers are not machines; we do not dance for punishment, we dance for love.

Rosie Kay’s 5 SOLDIERS  is touring nationally

But the joy, the pleasure of my embodied reality is worth it. I know exactly when my period is due, the sensation of ovulation and the micro-weight gains pre-period that affect my balance, my flexibility and my confidence. I understand the pressures of aesthetics, the desire to be thin, to be ripped, to be long limbed, to be fast and athletic. It’s never ending what you should or could be as a female body in my artform.

I am a dancer and choreographer and have been making work since graduating from London Contemporary Dance School in 1998. I set up my eponymous dance company in 2004, and would regularly tour the UK, Europe and the USA. My work includes 5 Soldiers and MK Ultra which explored conspiracy theory through the lens of pop stars, music video imagery and Britney Spears. I dance, I teach, I speak, and I collaborate.

The body is at the heart of my work and research. To explore the idea of how we inhabit our bodies, I have joined an all-male infantry battalion to train with soldiers, I have been on the beat with West Midlands Police, I have worked with children and teenagers. I have tried to understand the pain women feel about their identity, their changing body in puberty, their sexuality and their confined role in society. I’ve trowelled through the internet and dived into conspiracy theory.

At times, face-masked in mud, helmet and body armour on, clutching an SA 80, I felt more macho than any man I’d ever met. Leaping out of windows, throwing grenades, I felt as cocky and dangerous as any human could ever be. Dressed for a dinner at a private country estate, dangling earrings and floor length gown, I could not feel more feminine. But these are gender stereotypes. These are roles that say soldier = boy, dancer = girl. I stand on the front line of the gender debate, challenging myself and everyone around me, and it’s easier than it looks. You just have to engage your mind, engage your body and be in time in space in the present.

But the frontline of the gender debate is a dangerous place to be. Which is why today I find myself without a dance company, ostracised by my former executive co-director and my board of trustees.

I was shunned following a party at my house during which I disclosed that my new work would be based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando and I revealed my growing unease around the erasure of the word “women” and the biological denialism associated with Gender Ideology.

I did not intend to cause offence or make this about individuals — my ideas were forming and I wanted to have robust debate to find out what the other side thought. But to even float these thoughts in the privacy of my own home was deemed beyond the pale. I was subsequently accused of transphobia and have been investigated for bigotry by my own company. Last week, I decided that I no longer had any trust in my board, and that they had abused the grievance policy of the company to unfairly investigate me. I had no option but to resign, citing constructive dismissal in the hope that I might take back control of my life and my creativity. They tried to silence and shut me down; the next day they took my phone and personal email accounts that were intertwined with the company I founded. I’ve endured dishonest and gross misrepresentations of my views spoken and written about me, and I have quietly tried to maintain my sense of self, my sense of humour and my sanity.

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By Julie Bindel

I believe adult people have the right to be, to feel and to identify any way they want. I do believe, though, that if we erase the word women, if we stop it meaning a biologically based sex class, it becomes a word that can include any male who self-IDs and by doing so we erase women’s rights, the women’s movement and the very basis of attacking and naming sexism and misogyny. The idea that to even state that “a woman is a woman” is extremist or transphobic is deeply chilling and totally false.

The past few years have been dominated by the gender debate online, with the defining moment of the JK Rowling statement, and her eloquent exploration of defending the trans community, defending women, and attempting to explain how domestic violence so affects us as women, and that asking for same sex protections is not in itself transphobic. In fact, in our desperate desire to explain our mistrust of men, so many women have had to re-traumatise themselves, dredging up pain and hurt from the past, as I have done, to help to try to explain just how scared we all really are.

Throughout history it is the artists and the intellectuals who are shut down first — those who dare to question the status quo, or are the first to notice cultural shifts. As artists it is our job to be thinking ahead, following trends, thinking through the eventual outcomes or legacy of new waves of thought. And while my feminism burns bright, I was still feeling uncertain as to what was the right approach to this new way of thinking and talking. I wanted to do the right thing, I wanted to be inclusive, I am a modern progressive artist, I can adapt, change, shift my norms.

So I began looking for a novel or a book that I could hang a lot of my sex and gender questions on, reading, researching, studying Olympe de Gouges who wrote the amazing tenant of Rights for Women, the French Revolution and its betrayal of rights for all (and certainly not for women), sexual politics, and returning to second wave Angela Carter, bell hooks, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir.

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Then I came to Orlando. I saw the film, and then read the book, and I was utterly blown away. I had found Virginia Woolf pretty impenetrable as a young woman; but when I sat down with it this time, I read it in a heightened state over two fabulous days. I knew I’d fallen in love — with Orlando, with Virginia, and then after reading the letters between Virginia and Vita Sackville West (as recommended by the local LGBT reading group), I fell in love with Vita too. I was so inspired byWoolf’s third way of approaching all of this muddled and difficult stuff.

Orlando absolutely is a man at the start of the novel, a privileged, precocious boy, beautiful, charming, rich, aristocratic. He falls in love, he loses in love, he writes dreadful poetry, he is humiliated, he is confronted with real warfare and can not cope with his “manly role” to fight and he goes to sleep. When Orlando awakes, she is a woman. A total sex change. A different-sexed body, a thing that even with modern medicine, hormone treatment and surgery, can never, ever be achieved. But humans have the power of imagination. There isn’t one woman alive who hasn’t imagined what her life would be like had she been born a man, the freedoms, the right to pleasure, the right to self.

The problem, Woolf seems to suggest, is no man has really, deeply, truly thought about this the other way around. Men have still not truly grasped the radical notion that a woman is a fully created, total, embodied human being, worth exactly the same as any man. The fact that then Orlando does have a wonderfully wicked time in Georgian England (a time where at least 20% of all women and girls in London worked in the sex trade), is both delightful, titillating and fun.

Remember, it would take until the Sixties and the contraceptive pill before any woman could have sex with a man and not be concerned about the consequences of pregnancy, and what that meant for her and her baby’s future. Woolf knows that women and men are not so dissimilar. We have wants, needs, and desires, but we do not have equal treatment, in the eyes of society or in the eyes of the law. Interestingly, even the GRA of 2003 made sure that no woman could change gender to be a man in order to inherit aristocratic wealth. Exactly as in Orlando all those years before. Some things don’t change…

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Unfortunately, because of my attempt to articulate my gender critical beliefs, I now find myself without a company and without an Orlando. I stand accused of transphobia, which is damaging to the trans community, to women and to me and my reputation as an artist. But I must defend myself, defend my views and stand with the other, incredibly brave women and men who are speaking out against this dangerous ideology. The oppression of women is based entirely on our biology and our reproductive rights and vulnerabilities. We embody our oppression and our strength.

I feel this powerfully in my own body. A dancer’s body, but also a woman’s body; a body that has been raped, assaulted, attacked, strangled, knocked out and abused. My body has been in deep pain, physical and mental. My body has been a victim, that has scars running deep — on my scalp and in my soul. But it is also a body that has created, nurtured and given life. A body that coped with pregnancy, that survived an emergency birth, and then breastfed an infant until he was 30 months. A body of beauty, miracle, love and care. A body that sat in local cafes, shamed me with my bursting boobs, leaking nipples and abundant health. A body that was met, even as an infant suckled, with tuts and looks from by passers — the old judging my openness, the young unable to see boobs as anything but sex objects. I sat there, ashamed but not understanding why until I realised that I felt like an an animal. I was an animal. It shocked me. I couldn’t identify out of my life-giving properties. I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t female; I was a woman, a mother, a life giver, yet I wasn’t respected or liked or even tolerated because of it.

Something changed in me. Something deep, and I became braver, fiercer, angry even, about how badly women are treated. And it certainly wasn’t just me — it was all my friends, all those forceps births, split and cut vaginas, c-sections, dangerous births, the refusal to give any kind of painkillers, husbands and partners banned from the birthing room. And then there is the aftermath: the refusal to learn your baby’s name. The infantilising of you and your body and your baby, despite being a grown-up professional woman. I felt like I was 10 years old and being told off. The moment of sheer relief when one midwife treated you and your body with respect and compassion. Often the most overworked and exhausted of women who still hung onto a modicum of love and respect for our bodies and babies.

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By Debbie Hayton

This body, my body, it’s been through so much. But it is a dancing body, a body with more to give and to learn than ever before.

My body is why I challenge the belief that we are walking meat sacks. How can it be that we are just flesh, blood, fluids, nerves, muscles, bones. That we are nothing alive, we have nothing to feel, nothing to give pleasure. It is this sort of “transhumanistic philosophy”, that we are merely a brain homunculus behind two jiggling eyes, which is the destroyer of women, of our innate power in the universe, of our understanding that we are mammals, we live on a finite planet, we eat and we shit and we make love and we birth babies and we orgasm and we feel pain and we feel hurt and some of it is from outside of us and some it we invent inside ourselves.

We only have this life, this existence and this time on this planet. We cannot invent a new planet, we cannot pretend we do not exist, we cannot pretend our bodies are not ours. We are more than the sum of our parts, we are our bodies, minds and consciousnesses. We are only just now starting to truly understand the connectivity between our minds, bodies, nature and the planet.

So I say no to the new puritans, the sex deniers and the body snatchers. No to erasure of my sex, no to erasure of my boundaries and my safety. You are asking far, far too much and we know it. We must, and always must, state our truth of our own existence.