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The March selection for the Out of Your League Book Club is here! The link to register for this event is at the bottom of this newsletter, below the paywall.
I’m really stoked about this one. We’ll be reading Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers is Saving Ballet From Itself by Chloe Angyal.
Credit: Thomas + Co Photography
Chloe is someone I have long admired, and I’m thrilled to be in conversation with her about the world of ballet. There’s no one else I’d rather talk to about dance culture. I love this book so much that I even bought a copy for my physical therapist, who comes from the ballet world and regularly works with dancers.
From the book’s description:
A reckoning with one of our most beloved art forms, whose past and present are shaped by gender, racial, and class inequities--and a look inside the fight for its future.
Every day, in dance studios all across America, legions of little children line up at the barre to take ballet class. This time in the studio shapes their lives, instilling lessons about gender, power, bodies, and their place in the world both in and outside of dance.
In Turning Pointe, journalist Chloe Angyal captures the intense love for ballet that so many dancers feel, while also grappling with its devastating shortcomings: the power imbalance of an art form performed mostly by women, but dominated by men; the impossible standards of beauty and thinness; and the racism that keeps so many people of color out of ballet. As the rigid traditions of ballet grow increasingly out of step with the modern world, a new generation of dancers is confronting these issues head on, in the studio and on stage. For ballet to survive the twenty-first century and forge a path into a more socially just future, this reckoning is essential.
Chloe is a romance novelist, too, and one who wrote her dissertation on romantic comedies in Hollywood. She’s not new to this, she’s true to this (omg, I’m so sorry, I’ll see myself out). She writes (straight) ballet romance series “Dancers Down Under,” and she might be the only straight woman I would trust with a romance novel. Feel free to ask her about that work, as well!
Our Zoom event will be on Sunday, March 29th at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT. Chloe will be joining us for that conversation, which is only open to VIP All-Access or Biggest Fan tier paid subscribers. The conversation will be recorded and sent out to everyone who registered for the event, so you can watch it even if you can’t join us live.
Access to the Zoom event requires registration. You can register for ‘TURNING POINTE’ BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION at the link below:
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