DON’T FORGET WHY YOU ARE DANCING

Aurélie Dupont

Albin Michel, 480 pages, 2024

Winner of the Prix Georges Bizet du Livre de Danse 2025

✓A first time autobiography of the world famous French ballerina.
✓ A compelling and unique insider’s perspective into the world of ballet .
✓ A passionate and honest account of the challenges, sacrifices and joys of a vocation.

Dancing, falling, dancing again…

 She was a child who dreamed of being on stage, a little girl burning to become a star dancer, a teenager whose only desire was to dance.

For the first time, prima ballerina Aurélie Dupont recounts her dream come true. Notably, her story does not begin with her discovery of dance and her passion for music, but rather with a grueling journey of recovery from knee surgery two years after her nomination as Étoile. Dupont persevered even though she was told she would never dance again or at best would only be able to dance for a maximum of six months. We are plunged directly into the high cost of her absolute commitment to her vocation: the rigors of training, the suffering, humiliation, and sacrifices involved, the will to surpass herself, and above all, the joys and fears—the quintessence of what makes the Paris Opera Corps de Ballet a legendary place of heightened passions.

Of particular interest to ballet practitioners and lovers, Dupont offers a detailed and compelling insider’s perspective on the makings of a ballet. She describes the trust and connivance essential to the harmony of a pas de deux, and her relationships with choreographers—geniuses and/or tyrants—in particular the revelation that was her encounter with Pina Bausch, and her opening to contemporary dance.

A vibrantly passionate story, Don’t Forget Why You Are Dancing is a portrait that goes beyond dance, laying bare the destiny of a woman who fought hard to allow her personality and feelings to shine through.

Aurélie Dupont was born in Paris in 1973. Having dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer since childhood, she entered the Paris Opera Ballet School at age ten, after undergoing rigorous training. She joined the Corps de Ballet at just sixteen, before becoming a prima ballerina. She danced as Raymonda, and in Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote. Alternating between classical, neoclassical, and contemporary dance, Dupont danced in ballets by Roland Petit, Pina Bausch, and Sasha Waltz, among others. She created two ballets with Benjamin Millepied and succeeded him as Director of Dance at the Paris Opera from 2016 to 2022.