Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American BBallerina in Russia

Book Information

Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia (#ad)

Joy Womack, as told to Elizabeth Shockman

Rowman & Littlefield

Copyright 2025

ISBN: 978-1-5381-9937-4

Classical ballet is a dichotomy. Dancers perform superhuman movements that, according to the cliché, look effortless. Away from the stage, however, in rehearsal studios, directors’ offices, and even in doctor's offices, the reality of the effort required to be a professional ballerina plays out. In healthy dancers, and in best-case scenarios, there is a desire to seek perfection through difficult physical work and mental exercises like those of elite athletes. An elite few make a professional career out of ballet and retire with their health, both physical and mental, intact. Many, however, do not. There is something about the combination of the perfectionistic and driven personality necessary to be a ballerina and a toxic (albeit improving) historical culture within classical ballet that often leads to serious mental illness, permanent physical injury, and even death. And for what?

Joy Womack's autobiography, Behind the Red Velvet Curtain: An American Ballerina in Russia, as told to Elizabeth Shockman, made me ask that question repeatedly. For what? Womack’s story is full of what, to someone outside the ballet world, seems like hyperbole but it is not. For what? Why would a girl physically and mentally distance herself from her family at the age of thirteen? Why would she allow herself to be physically and emotionally abused by teachers and directors throughout her career? And most distressing of all, why would she be her own worst enemy by harming herself, binging and purging her sustenance, and keeping her mind chained to an idealized art form that, at its worst, is no less controlling than a cultish religion. For what?

Then I remembered my missing toenails. The toenails on my big toes are gone, surgically removed, voluntarily, when I was sixteen years old. I had fleshy big toes that were prone to ingrown toenails when I danced en pointe. I studied classical ballet from the age of four and attended a top school from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. I identified with Joy Womack. Her constant striving for perfection, the constant comparison of herself to others, and her willingness to force her body to do things it was not designed to do.

Plenty of American girls have had similar experiences to mine. Boys have it much easier. Because so few are interested in ballet, they are in demand. The competition they face is serious but less so than for girls. Girls have it rough. Typically, they begin their study with a local “Miss” school. If they are in the right location, are good enough, driven enough, and their parents have enough disposable income, they take the next step and attend a school attached to a professional company. If they are extra lucky, have enough money, and enough talent, they do SAB’s summer intensive. Very few make it to an apprenticeship with a professional company, and far fewer get an actual contract in which they are paid for what they do. Joy Womack achieved astronomically more than the average American female ballet dancer. As a fifteen-year-old, she struggled with competition at the Kirov Academy in Washington DC. She sought out other programs, however her parents had eight other children and therefore not enough disposable income to afford an expensive American school. Therefore, Joy decided that Russia and the Bolshoi Ballet's feeder school, the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, was the only place for her.

There are other clichés about ballet: that the moms are difficult; that all dancers struggle with eating disorders; that in America it is a job while in Russia, ballet is a religion. (My own Russian teacher told me just that.) In Womack’s view, American and Russian ballet cultures were opposites. In America you dance Balanchine, your teachers are soft, and you are on your own in terms of being an independent, fully-functioning adult. In Russia, you study a truer classical form, you kill yourself (almost literally) for your art, and the state takes care of you. Her story is every one of the clichés wrapped up in a single frustrating, flawed, honest, talented, and extremely tenacious human whirlwind called Joy Womack.

Her autobiography is a collection of recollections as told to Elizabeth Shockman over the course of twelve years. Shockman is a journalist, and they became friends in Russia early in Joy’s stay there. Thankfully, Joy matures as the story progresses. She acknowledges having a complicated personal relationship with Russia and with America. She sometimes has selective memory particularly when discussing her idealized view of how the Russian government treats artists. After a successful career with the Kremlin Ballet, she moved back to the US for the first time to dance in Boston. She is shocked when she must navigate an adult world that includes rent, cell phone contracts, and commuting to work. She is nostalgic about Russia and the fact that it takes care of its artists as if they are perpetually college-aged semi-adults still on Mother Russia’s wireless plan. She forgets that she has already told the reader that obtaining her paychecks was a bureaucratic nightmare, that one month she was paid fifty rubles, and that sometimes she had to charge her dad’s credit card just to eat. Joy, especially the younger, teen-age version, like most teenagers, can be frustrating to read about. There were times I wanted to reach through the pages and shout some sense into her. I wondered what it must have been like to parent a child so determined that she was willing to do anything to fulfill her dreams, no matter what the price. There were other times, especially when she wrote of her self-hatred and the abuse that she suffered, that I wanted to hold her closely, and tell her everything was going to be OK.

In her youth, Joy was deeply religious, and one would hope that her faith would have been a source of solace for her. Instead, it was a source of constant mental anguish. Joy's faith and her relationship with her parents, especially her mother, were complexly intertwined. During early childhood, her parents raised her in a deeply conservative Christian environment that her family later acknowledged as cultish. Her father, an outgoing, larger-than-life, Texas dreamer is let off the hook by Joy. Her mom, however, is not so lucky. Joy's mental health struggles and her sometimes poor decision-making are connected to a fraught relationship with a mother with her own demons. Like Joy, her mom struggled with disordered eating. After obtaining her medical degree from Harvard and starting a family later in life, she suffered years of mental abuse and harsh judgment from her church. The stress of raising nine children under the oppressive gaze of church members left her with toxic shame and guilt. From Joy’s perspective, she was always busy. Joy left home at thirteen and physical proximity to her mother was limited to once- or twice-yearly visits home from Russia. Her mom seemed like a seagull mom, engaging in times of crisis, taking over, and then distractedly flying away again. Her attention to Joy came in fits and starts rather than a constant, boring flow of steady parenting year in and year out. Unfortunately, Joy and her mom did not fully relate on a deep level until Joy was well into adulthood. In fairness, this is Joy's story, so we only get a one-dimensional view of her mom. I would love to know more about her mother's perspective. Parenting the whirlwind that is Joy Womack could not have been easy.

The arc of Joy’s faith is the driver of the sometimes disastrous decisions that she makes. When she reflects on her childhood, she shares mature insights into the way her early faith shaped her way of thinking. “I learned a way of thinking at Lighthouse that felt like fitting fastened wheels into an iron rail. My brain got soldered to a steel groove of right and wrong, black and white, in and out - a groove along which it felt appropriate to just chug along. Critical thinking skills were not necessary to keep moving on this sort of track. Neither was compassion or questioning. Questioning, in fact, was something that could get you in trouble. It was wrong and an affront. Good kids, faithful kids, patriotic kids, kids who were going somewhere didn’t ask questions. This was a rail that helped me fit in at all sorts of ballet companies, as it turned out. It helped me fit in in Russia.” (Womack 17)

Until early adulthood, Joy maintained her faith in a strict form of Christianity where she felt constant shame. She relentlessly berated herself before God and found no peace in her faith. After leaving her church, she eventually matured into her own beliefs, which were different than those of her parents. Ironically, she replaced a cult-like religion with a different form of worship – the world of Russian classical ballet. About her faith, she says, “But faith was still important to me. I just didn't want the judgmental, nationalistic, corporate version of it.” (Womack 239) It is unclear if Joy sees a connection between the brand of American evangelical Christianity that she renounced and the art form, with its connection to Russian nationalism, that she replaced it with as an object of worship. She says, “Surviving or thriving in Russia was all about scrambling to get yourself to a patch of ground on which the Kremlin powers had indicated their attention would shine. And in Russia, I had learned, the sun shone with reliability on ballet. Ballet was the sort of thing considered patriotic, central to Russia’s national identity. And for more than a decade, I had plugged myself into this world of passion, prestige, and myth making… It didn’t seem to matter where in the country I went… I could find a theater that hallowed the art form to which I had dedicated my life.” (Womack 256)

By the end of her autobiography, Joy, and her mother, matured and seemed to find peace. I found myself rooting for her, but not for obvious reasons. As a former dancer, one would think I would have cared if she got the lead in Swan Lake or won the Artist of Russia designation. I could not have cared less. Instead, I rooted for her when reading about her biggest triumphs. When she recognized the denigration of groveling to the director of the Bolshoi Ballet and walked away. And especially, when she broke down the wall between her and her mother and shared the endless mental burdens that had weighed her down. Instead of being the usual six thousand miles apart, she was able to hug her, and her mom was able to hug her back.

Bibliography

Womack, Joy. Behind the Red Velvet Curtain. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025.