BookBrowse Reviews Dances by Nicole Cuffy

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The dazzling story of a dancer questioning her place in stardom.

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Nicole Cuffy's novel Dances reckons with how people are held by but also transform the spaces they inhabit, physically and otherwise. As the first Black ballerina to be promoted to principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, narrator Cece Cordell is hyperaware of how she must push her body to conform to this predominantly white atmosphere in which the only reference point many seem to have for her existence is the (real-life) dancer Misty Copeland, for whom she is sometimes mistaken. But when a friend who has started her own dance company pressures Cece to join, convinced she will be more comfortable in a less traditional setting, Cece resists. Her dream of ballet has always been specific to the NYCB and its classic reputation. In other words, the place where she feels she most belongs is engineered to reject her; even if it has already, to an extent, accepted her. But as she points out, ballet itself requires adaptation wrought through sheer willpower: "The human body is not made to do the things dancers make our bodies do." Dances isn't only about what ballet has done to Cece, but what she might do to it.

From a certain point of view, Cuffy's novel is the opposite of a cautionary tale. As she tries to adjust to her escalating fame, Cece maintains entanglements with people in her company that look foreboding. She is convinced that Kaz, the ballet's artistic director, is attracted to her and that this displeases his wife Cecilia, whose name playfully brands her as a nemesis to Cece (full name Celine) as protagonist. Cece is also involved in a clandestine relationship with her dance partner Jasper, a somewhat selfish and thoughtless man. All these people occasionally do cringeworthy and even vaguely threatening things; at moments, Cece's fate appears to hang in the balance. Yet the truth is that she has already defied the most intimidating obstacles that might have held her back, she is well aware of the unique precarity of her success, and this is still what she has chosen. Dances is not a coming-of-age tale of exposure to a harsh world but of a character's evolving understanding of what her continued existence in this world means to her. Through the everyday drudgery of the athletic maintenance that makes up the bulk of Cece's life, the practices and performances that define it, and flashbacks that take us through her journey to stardom, we see how she feels pulled in different directions by herself and others, not only questioning her celebrity but the specifics of how she should conduct her career.

Cuffy also writes about the overlap between creation and self-destruction, as demonstrated through Cece's attempts to locate her missing brother Paul, a visual artist and art school dropout who supported her dancing in the face of their mother's misgivings. Cece is uncomfortable with what she has achieved, while Paul, who has dealt with drug addiction, nurses a sense of failure as he channels his artistic inclinations into nighttime graffiti sessions (the book briefly slips into his perspective). The struggles of both siblings gesture to how art can eclipse the self, but they also show more specifically how the devaluing of art by (perhaps especially American) society creates a fractured sense of being in those who choose to pursue it, particularly if they don't look the part of someone typically relegated the privilege of doing so.

A substantial debut, Dances reveals Cuffy as an author not just interested in characterization and circumstance, but the deeper implications of narrative. As Cece describes the ballets she dances, which tell stories that reflect her own blurred reality via illusions and enchantments, she searches for truths to cling to in the midst of all she has sacrificed and lost, to understand what is real even of her physical being — how her body looks to her in a mirror versus how it appears to others. Cece's language — ballet terminology mixed with her sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes wry descriptions — brings to the page a deft representation of the forces at war inside of her that still have the ability to resolve into something intentional and harmonious. She has created a life in a world not made for her, but who is she in this unlikely place where she has willed herself into existence? What power has she brought to it? Who is she to others and who are they to her? As she says at one point in an interview for New York magazine that is otherwise peppered with small lies, seeming briefly genuine: "It started, for me, with the music." The answers are in the dances themselves:

"I am at attention. I take my place and bourrée toward Gwen, who is dancing the Lilac Fairy. I use her for balance as I go into an arabesque penché, reaching with my whole body toward Jasper, an enchanted Désiré. He wants me, but Lilac stands between me and him. I am only a vision. He has not earned me yet."

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2023, and has been updated for the March 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.