We are not born feminists, they say.
Posted at 7:30 p.m.
But here is how Pascale Navarro became it. It is the reflection which is essential following the reading of its very intimate dance class, the journalist and essayist’s second foray into the world of storytelling. After mint and cumin (2020), where she recounted the significant dishes of her childhood, here she describes her passion for dance. His devotion. And his disenchantment.
From the age of 8 to 18, she devoted her life to it. His body. And, as a bonus, his soul. The author of‘Forbidden to women and of To put an end to feminine modesty looks back over these 10 years of his life through short technical chapters devoted to all the exercises and other movements that punctuated his daily life. Folded, pas de deux and overwhelmed are also each time associated with music (Satie, Kate Bush or Michel Rivard), which adds a touch of concreteness and emotion to the subject, which we know is loaded from the outset.
Yet it is all in sobriety, with a few discreet insinuations, that we finally guess that despite all the sublimation of her art, her investment and her relentlessness, the golden dream of the ballerina will not materialize. Because too tall, not skinny enough, the house of cards will crumble. It’s said: tall and other buxom dancers have no place at Les Grands Ballets (or had their place, a note at the end of the text specifies that “dance schools have evolved over the past forty years. […] Maybe not everywhere, but more and more. “)
Except that despite other traumatic events (on which she only slips a word, we would certainly have taken more), she will bounce back. With so much determination. Less at the bar than in writing. It was written. Under the air of a dance novel, we have here a real (albeit modest) initiatory story.
The dance class
Pascal Navarro
Lemeac
110 pages