Welcome to burn it all down. I'm very excited about. This is going to scream and shout. Oh yeah.

Welcome to Burn It All Down, the feminist sports podcast you need. I'm Jessica Luther, and I'm very excited about today's guest, Chloe Angel. This is very fun for me to have Chloe here. It's a real full circle moment for me.

We've known each other for about nine years now, I think. And I talk about Chloe a fair amount,

even if I don't always say her name, because it was Chloe at the beginning of 2013,

who said to me, point blank, you should get paid to write. And then pitched a story for me

to different outlets that landed at Bitch Magazine on Valentine's Day that year, and it was about

romance novels. I learned so much from Chloe about how to pitch, and she gave me confidence to

strike out on my own. Chloe played such a large part in my freelance career, and you can draw a

straight line from that

moment in 2013 to this one right now. And that makes me so happy. Chloe, will you tell our listeners

who you are and what you do? Hi, I'm Chloe Angel. Hi. I'm Chloe Angel and I am a journalist and author and the author of the new book, Turning Point,

how a new generation of dancers is saving ballet from itself, which is a reported work about ballet

and about the future of ballet, about what has to change to make sure that ballet is a safe and fair

and relevant and equitable art form that can survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Yes. So you've written this new important book that like pulls a curtain back on the ballet world.

And now I'm going to do the thing that I always hate when people do to me,

but I'm doing it to you. And I'm going to read the first paragraph of your book at you.

I can also recite it for you by heart. I'm not going to, but I could because that's what I do

when I do book events. So I think I could probably do it verbatim. It's perfect. So this is, I mean, you set it up really quickly for the reader. You write, quote, every day and dance studios all across America, legions of children line up at the bar and take a ballet class. This book is about what they learn there, not just about dance, but about gender, race, and power, about the value of their bodies and minds, about their place in in the world both in and outside of dance.

We're definitely going to get to some of that in a minute.

But first, Chloe, let's get the tough question out of the way because you're here on Burned

All Down, a feminist sports podcast, is ballet sport?

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