Collins’ study of anatomy leads to one of the most memorable incidents in the unfinished memoir. She goes to the dissection hall and pulls back the sheet on a cadaver and finds something unexpected:

Although Collins wants to leave, she forces herself to sit still and draw the dead man for the usual hour. Then she goes out and never returns to the dissection hall. This incident shows a great deal about Janet Collins, her persistence and sensitivity, but also about how a dance artist is made. Her need to experience, her visceral reactions, and crucially, her observation of her own reaction — all this powerfully combats the idea that dance is merely athletic.

Collins places deeply embodied experience on the inside of the dance in her discussion of her own dance career:

Her solo flight may be the primary reason she is so little-known today. Her affiliation with the Metropolitan Ballet was short, and she built no school or technique, left behind no students; her few choreographic works were mostly made on and for her own body. But her explanation of her solo flight, her sensual intelligence and moving insight, all this will make her matter far more than biographical data can.

The best parts of Lewin’s book do not so much evoke Collins anew as trace the shape of her absence…. When Lewin claims, in her epilogue, that ‘a person’s life has been saved,’ Collins is not saved, but profoundly lost, as all dance artists are in time.

The best parts of Lewin’s book do not so much evoke Collins anew as trace the shape of her absence. When Glen Tetley describes Collins’ dancing — “She was fleet, she was quicksilver, she was magical, she was like an extraordinary startled animal” (p. 158) — I can’t see her, but I can, briefly, imagine her effect. The rest of the book, though, buries Collins in data — exhaustive quotations from less-than-skilled reviewers, lists of fellow performers, disquisitions on this or that apparently related topic, scholarly and tentative claims for Collins’ importance that seem rather to undermine than to exalt her. When Lewin claims, in her epilogue, that “a person’s life has been saved” (p. 297), Collins is not saved, but profoundly lost, as all dance artists are in time.

In one way, the dancer is preserved: this volume’s illustrations allow readers to see Collins as she might have looked in motion. What Collins says about Pavlova applies equally to herself: “I have never seen a photograph taken of Anna Pavlova that is ‘dead’ — she always looks alive, like she is captured in a moment of movement” (p. 8). One photo shows Collins in a sky-high leap, her back arched in what must have been an explosive moment, yet every limb is as perfectly placed as if she were sitting on the ground in front of a mirror, even her head, even her radiant eyes. She must have been something to see.

It is notable that the book’s cover photo, Collins in a tutu, standing sur les pointes, is still a startling image. Ballet’s racism hides under “aesthetic considerations” — the violation of a black swan in a line of white ones — or perhaps it is the other way around, aesthetic considerations taken for granted and solidifying over time into racism. The picture of the corps de ballet has changed: Middle-eastern, Asian, and biracial dancers have broken up the swan-white ranks. Yet the line Collins so spectacularly breached still exists. If Collins were young today, would her path through dance be any easier?