Chapter One: What the Hecky Is Dance, Anyway? 🤔🩰

Okay. Hi. Sit down. 🪑 I need to tell you something and it is genuinely A Lot.

Last year — big news — I joined a danse-études programme: real school in the morning, real ballet every single afternoon. The dream. THE DREAM. Except the dream comes with a compulsory subject called “Histoire de la Danse” (History of dance), and reader, I need to tell you what goes on in there. 📚

By halfway through the year, we had covered exactly two (2) topics: Swan Lake, and Louis XIV. That’s it. HOW many freaking hours can one class spend discussing the plot of Swan Lake??? I love a doomed swan as much as the next girl — more, probably — but at some point we ALL know how it ends. And then came the exam, and I am not making these questions up. Question: “In which year was Louis XIV born?” Excuse me — in what possible way is the EXACT YEAR of his BIRTH relevant to dance? He was not born doing a plié. Question: “Who was his tutor?” His TUTOR. Not his dance master — that would almost be a fair question. His tutor. Is this Histoire de la Danse or Histoire de France?? And those were two questions out of FIVE. Dude. 😑

So somewhere between memorising royal birthdays and trying to keep my eyes opened when hearing the plot of Swan Lake for the four-hundredth time, I realised something genuinely horrifying. I still don’t actually know where ANY of this came from. The real story! And nobody here was ever going to tell me! Bombastic side eye to the entire adult academic population. 😒

So I decided to look into it myself and write a REAL history of dance — hopefully a tiny bit less boring. How hard can it be? 💁‍♀️

Reader. It was hard. It was SO hard. Turns out the history of dance is completely unhinged and NOBODY warns you, and now I have to be the one to sit you down and explain it, which is honestly so typical, but fine, I’ll do it, because I’m a giver.

Here is the first fact that made me drop my water bottle mid-sip. Dance is old. And I don’t mean my mum’s music’s old. I don’t even mean castles old. Dance is older than writing. WRITING. People were out here doing choreography before anyone had invented the alphabet to complain about it. 😭

Because think about it: somewhere, thousands of years ago, some random person did a little happy wiggle because they caught a fish for dinner. And, technically, THAT was a dance. The first choreographer in the history of the universe and she was a hungry cave girl. To that anonymous fish-wiggler I say: Icon. Legend. We would’ve been besties, I just know it. 🐟✨

And it wasn’t only in one place, which is the bit that gives me actual goosebumps, and I am extremely hard to impress, ask literally anyone. Go anywhere on the whole entire planet and you’ll find people dancing. A baby’s born? Dance. There’s a wedding? Dance. It rains? Dance. It refuses to rain and everyone’s in a huge mood about it? Somehow, ALSO dance. Nobody had a meeting. Nobody sent a group chat. Humans just… knew. It’s built in, like the way your foot starts tapping to a good song before your brain has even agreed to it. You’re basically the fish-wiggler. At a fish stall. 🐟

So then you’re probably going: okay Gigi, if the whole planet dances, why is your book mainly about ballet and its weird little cousins? Fair. Ten points to you. You’re already smarter than half my class (low bar, but still). 💯

Here’s the truth. This book follows ONE branch of the enormous dance family tree — the branch that grew up in posh European palaces, got obsessed with rules and pointy toes, then had the most DRAMATIC teenage rebellion you have ever seen in your life (bring tissues), and finally ran off around the world and mixed with everybody. It’s got a very boring official name — “Western concert dance” — which sounds like something you’d get dragged to on a school trip, but I PROMISE the actual story is not boring. It’s the opposite of boring. It’s basically a four-hundred-year soap opera with better shoes.

Yes, a soap opera about how a bunch of VERY extra people spent about four hundred years taking dance — the fun, natural, anyone-can-do-it thing — and turning it into something so hard and so ridiculous but somehow, against all odds and all logic, so beautiful that grown adults will pay actual money, sit in a dark room, and CRY watching someone pretend to be a swan. A swan!!!! Every person in this book was completely extra AND changed the world, at the exact same time. That’s just… the vibe of art. Show up, look slightly insane, mean it with your whole entire chest. So. Let’s meet them. 😔✌️

But before we start — full transparency, because we’re basically besties now — I have a bias and I am NOT going to hide it. The French invented ballet. Fine. Credit where it’s due, well done France, have a biscuit. 🍪 But let’s be real, they also made it a bit… formal. A bit stiff. Dare I say boring? A bit “everybody sit up straight and admire the nice tidy symmetry.” 🥱 It was the RUSSIANS who grabbed it, fed it, gave it feelings and snowstorms and tragic queens and actual literal magical horses, and turned it into the emotional rollercoaster. So yes. This book will not hide our obvious favouritism for Russian ballet. I have zero regrets and I will not be taking questions. 🇷🇺💅

I’m also going to keep telling you about ballets that Europe barely ever bothers to put on— the hidden gems nobody warns you exist. Ballets with names like The Little Humpbacked Horse and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai and The Legend of Love, which sound made up but are extremely real and extremely iconic. Somebody has to be their hype girl. It’s going to be me. Buckle up. 💎

We begin - of course we do - in France. A fourteen-year-old boy who happened to be the single most powerful person in all of Europe, woke up one morning and decided that the best way to run an entire country was to put on a costume made of actual literal sunbeams and DANCE. In heels. In front of everybody. 🌞

And honestly? Slay. Absolute slay. I would have done the exact same thing.

Turn the page. It gets so much worse from here (in the best possible way). 😌✨