Review: "Dances" by Nicole Cuffy

 

Dances by Nicole Cuffy
Published May 2023 via One World
★★★★

Cece is a dancer—it's all she's ever wanted to be, and at 22 she's poised to shatter barriers as the first Black principal dancer at NYCB. But even as her professional life is taking off, her personal life is getting murkier, as Cece wrestles with the future of her romantic relationship and where she and her mother and brother fall with each other.

If nothing else this book set in the dance world is full of just that: dance. Details about steps and rehearsals and muscles popping and sore toes. This is not the book for you if you want ballet to be the background while romance or something else is at the forefront; it is the book for you if you want a novel that is about ballet in the sense that it is what the main character lives for, and what she is happiest thinking about and doing. I am, uncoordinated non-dancer that I am, oddly fond of dance books, so this was right up my alley—lots of time in the studio, lots of ironing out kinks, lots of steps and sweat and minute details.

There is nonetheless quite a bit of interpersonal conflict and to-do, but I like the line that Dances is toeing between, well, drama and lack of drama. There are quite a lot of ways in which this could get Dramatic, but I find it more interesting—and Cece more likable, if that matters—that she's pretty calm about things, pretty measured, even when things get difficult or she doesn't like an outcome.

Cuffy more or less opts out of recent real-world conversations about abuse in the dance world (including at NYCB), but there is a consistent through-thread of what it means for Cece to be Black in a field (not just ballet but classical ballet) that has not traditionally been accepting of performers who are not lily-white: not just that she is held to different standards, but that she's constantly held up against a single other successful Black ballerina. For a very long time the vast majority of the fiction, too, about ballet has been about white girls and women, and it's nice to see that changing—even if it might be a while before the real version of NYCB catches up.

Not everything is tied up with a bow here. I'd have liked more resolution with Cece's family, and I'm very curious about Irine's company...enough so that I'm wondering whether there might eventually be a related book focusing on her, but maybe that's just me daydreaming about more dance books?

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.