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Swan Dive

The Making of a Rogue Ballerina

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Swan Dive

By: Georgina Pazcoguin
Narrated by: Georgina Pazcoguin
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About this listen

Award-winning New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin, a.k.a. the Rogue Ballerina, gives listeners a backstage tour of the real world of elite ballet - the gritty, hilarious, sometimes shocking truth you don’t see from the orchestra circle.

In this love letter to the art of dance and the sport that has been her livelihood, NYCB’s first Asian American female soloist Georgina Pazcoguin lays bare her unfiltered story of leaving small-town Pennsylvania for New York City and training amid the unique demands of being a hybrid professional athlete/artist, all before finishing high school. She pitches us into the fascinating, whirling shoes of dancers in one of the most revered ballet companies in the world with an unapologetic sense of humour about the cutthroat, survival-of-the-fittest mentality at NYCB. Some swan dives are literal: even in the ballet, there are plenty of face-plants, backstage fights, late-night parties, and raucous company bonding sessions.

Rocked by scandal in the wake of the #MeToo movement, NYCB sits at an inflection point, inching toward progress in a strictly traditional culture, and Pazcoguin doesn’t shy away from ballet’s dark side. She continues to be one of the few dancers openly speaking up against the sexual harassment, mental abuse, and racism that in the past went unrecognized or was tacitly accepted as par for the course - all of which she has painfully experienced firsthand.

Tying together Pazcoguin’s fight for equality in the ballet with her infectious and deeply moving passion for her craft, Swan Dive is a pause-resisting one-of-a-kind account that guarantees you'll never view a ballerina or a ballet the same way again.

©2021 Georgina Pazcoguin (P)2021 Macmillan Publishers International Ltd
Entertainment & Celebrities Celebrity Funny Witty New York
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Critic reviews

"Swan Dive is to ballet what Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential was to restaurants, a chance to go behind the serene front of house to the sweaty, foul-mouthed, psychofrenzy backstage." (Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times)

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A bit cringe

Some interesting stories bravely told but the focus was way too much on the rest of it - it became mainly a pretty embarrassing and self-indulgent reiteration of endless “not like the other girls” edgelord-ery. A notable lowlight was her claim that the US is the only country that still regularly performs The Nutcracker which is frankly one of the most hilariously stupid things I’ve ever heard. Fluent but repetitive prose.

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