Tiny Dancer

Evan Zimroth’s story goes like this: When she is 12, Zimroth, an ambitious ballet student, falls under the sway of an older Russian ballet teacher--identified (rather annoyingly) only as F. He is seductive, controlling, a bully. He promises to make her a great dancer, but his methods are odd, and they include, most significantly, whacking his students with a cane--on the arm, the thigh, the wrist, the ankle--sometimes as a form of correction, sometimes as a form of punishment and sometimes, perhaps, as a form of fun. Zimroth is romantic and emotionally starved and falls madly in love with him. But after two years of study, she flouts his authority, and he kicks her out of his school. She goes on to become a dancer--although not, by her own admission, a great one. Years after they part, F. and his former student meet, and the great obsession of Zimroth’s life barely remembers her.

In recounting her story, Zimroth expertly reveals the paradoxical mind-set of the young girl who is drawn to ballet: stoical yet daring; submissive yet narcissistic; ecstatic yet disciplined; self-critical yet audacious. She reveals, too, the ways in which ballet functions as religion: Zimroth yearns “[t]o purify myself, to pare myself down to some formal essence of beauty . . . to achieve the tensile delicacy and fastidiousness that a life in ballet demanded.” Like so many other girls who become dancers, Zimroth aches for authenticity, spirituality and self-expression and--mysteriously, preternaturally--finds the strict idiom of an 18th century French art form the perfect vehicle for achieving them. Thus, she scorns the improvisational, freestyle dance class in which her mother briefly enrolls her: “I wanted order and beauty and the stylized disposal of the limbs.”

Yet from the beginning, “Collusion” is a tease. Zimroth drops a series of hints that suggest, at least to the ballet aficionado, that F. may be George Balanchine--which would indeed be shocking news, because Balanchine was known for his unerring courtesy to his dancers. “F. . . . stares at us, his wiry, lithe body folded together, knees crossed, elbow on knee, and head in hand. . . . He has a hooked nose, I notice, and intense, brooding eyes that measure us, as if he were calculating when to uncoil himself and spring.” Anyone who has studied with Balanchine, or even seen Martha Swope’s photos of him in rehearsal, will instantly recognize this portrait. It is with a start, then, that the reader realizes, some pages later, that F.’s ballet academy is not even located in New York City (though we are never told where it is), and that F. could not, of course, have been Balanchine. Indeed, far from being a great master, it slowly emerges that F. is not just a has-been but a never-was, “a lesser figure in a legendary ballet dynasty,” whose “life in the ballet world had not gone quite as he had hoped.” His children, his three marriages and, from all available evidence, his career: “How bitterly disappointing they all were,” Zimroth writes.

Zimroth regards F.’s training techniques--his mind games, his insults, his physical abuse (he hits his students’ hands with a hairbrush as they turn, measuring their velocity by how much blood is sprayed)--as the paradigm for all ballet training and the template of all ballet discipline. “[D]ancers covet violence as a gift,” Zimroth pronounces; the smack, she writes, epitomizes “the very moment--the sharp, transient moment--of intimacy. . . . [F]or a dancer it takes on breathtaking sweetness; a dancer can’t get enough of it.”

These assertions may sound bizarre to the non-dancer, and I suspect they will sound equally bizarre to most professional dancers and dance students too. It is not at all clear how or why Zimroth has decided that her own experiences of violence are typical. And because she never deigns to identify F. or his school, she has shielded herself from any judgments about how representative--or aberrant--those experiences really were.

But it is erotic masochism, not ballet pedagogy, that constitutes the heart of Zimroth’s story, and she describes her relationship with F.--especially her love of physical submission--in a ferociously overblown language that echoes Ayn Rand. “When F. first so unexpectedly hit me . . . [h]e . . . showed me beyond words what it felt like to be a woman, with a woman’s submission and a woman’s power over a man,” Zimroth gushes, establishing the theme that will be repeated in increasingly inflamed prose as “Collusion” progresses. “His act was both almost rhapsodic and yet deeply controlled. . . . The mark he left on my inner thigh was a brand, my initiation into ownership. It changed me utterly. I knew I would be marked by him forever. . . . I became more and more in thrall to F.’s violence.” And lest we suspect that the power relation between the older male mentor and the 13-year-old girl is not quite equal--that, despite the subjective intensity of Zimroth’s desire, she is being manipulated--she insists, perhaps a bit too adamantly: “I took part freely, it was my fault, I liked it, I wanted it. . . . I was not a hostage to F.’s violence. Mutually, reciprocally, we had struck a covenant of possession.”

While F.--”the most dangerous and beautiful man I had ever seen”--sometimes hits Zimroth during ballet classes, their real drama unfolds in his private office. This is a clandestine room, Zimroth portentously (and repetitiously) reminds us, where “anything can happen,” where “I would have risked anything.” Sometimes F. summons Zimroth to this inner sanctum to talk, sometimes to dance, sometimes to eat, sometimes to strike her. But the real “anything” that Zimroth is hinting at, and hoping for, is sex, preferably coerced.

On hearing that another ballet teacher had been arrested for pedophilia, Zimroth wistfully laments, “F. never quite took that risk, although I imagined for years that he might. I wished for it. So if the experience wasn’t erotic for him, I am sorry. Truly sorry. I did everything I could to make it so.” After one especially disappointing encounter with F., in which he declines to either hit or bed her, she petulantly complains, “He should have made love to me; I see that now. He should at least have hit me. If he had . . . ordered me to take off my practice clothes and then taken me with no explanation or affection . . . I would have surrendered to him. Completely, without question.” (When she is older, Zimroth does surrender: The very first line of “Collusion” reads “I had just been raped, or so I told myself,” although the alleged assailant this time is not the beloved F. but a boyfriend with whom Zimroth is “deeply in love.”)

What’s a girl to do, though, if the object of her obsession refuses to either seduce or rape her? Pretend. Thus Zimroth treats us to three pages of a lovingly constructed soft-core encounter between F. and herself--starting with “The older man examines the girl” and ending with “She opens her legs”--although this scene is entirely fictitious.

What is astonishing here are not Zimroth’s fantasies of powerlessness, coercion and submission--fantasies that are hardly unique to her--but, rather, her staunchly unreflective idealization of them. Indeed, this book often seems to be written less about an adolescent girl than by one. Zimroth seems remarkably uninterested in what led her into the relationship with F. or in what her fantasies might mean; she is, however, ardently devoted to embellishing the relationship and glorifying the fantasy, and she clearly has no intention of relinquishing either one. “I will recall F. over and over, rehearse my stories about F. again and again; I won’t ‘get beyond’ them or transcend them or assimilate them,” Zimroth defiantly states. (But who, exactly, is she defying?) “My secret theater is not going to fade. . . . I still long for and miss F. . . . I think that I tell these stories about F. so I can dwell on them forever.”

Yet as “Collusion” unfolds--and certainly by the time it ends--the reader is likely to view this non-affair less as a great coup de foudre and more as the rather pathetic obsession of a teenage girl for a bitter, sadistic (and married) older man. Perhaps Zimroth truly would, as she repeatedly boasts, have “risked everything”--but it becomes increasingly clear that F. is risking nothing at all. What is so discomfiting is Zimroth’s inability, even now, to recognize this; thus where she sees grandeur, we see shabbiness. “I can never get enough of his strange, damaged, ironic yearning over me,” Zimroth writes, but by this point we know that the yearning, and the damage, are all hers.

Unfortunately for Zimroth, the book on ballet masochism--sexual, emotional, psychological and physical--has already been written. Gelsey Kirkland’s “Dancing on My Grave,” published 13 years ago, scandalized the ballet world and became a bestseller. This was partly because of its copious doses of sexual torment, drug addiction and mental illness; partly because of its iconoclastic attack on Balanchine (and, to a lesser extent, on Mikhail Baryshnikov); and partly because it was difficult to believe that an artist of Kirkland’s caliber hated herself quite so completely and had been quite so intent on destroying her phenomenal gifts. Yet even Kirkland’s most shocking admissions (and accusations) could not, ultimately, diminish her artistic legacy; there are still those who regard Kirkland as the greatest dancer of her generation. (More recently, Allegra Kent’s memoir “Once a Dancer . . .” revealed the emotional demons that this remarkable ballerina--another Balanchine protege--struggled with throughout her long and troubled career.)

Zimroth’s story--unlike those of Kirkland and Kent--is simple, indeed rather thin (and could certainly have been told in fewer than 230 pages). But it’s the teller, not the tale, that is ultimately the problem here. Though every incident recounted in this book may well be true, “Collusion” is fundamentally mendacious. It lacks the sine qua non of a good memoir: a credible narrator--credible, that is, because the author has critically examined her own experiences and has shucked woozy self-deception for clarity and insight. Full of sound and fury, “Collusion” signifies--well, not quite nothing, but surely far less than its author imagines.