“Have you ever heard of a place called the Bal Tabarin?”
I hadn’t, but that question began a journey – a dance, if you will – that will result in the publication of my third novel, The Paris Dancer, by Head of Zeus on 13th February next year.
Once as famous as the Moulin Rouge, the Bal Tabarin was a Parisian music hall that was sadly razed to the ground in the 1960s. At one time associated with some of France’s most famous stars, it was also the workplace of names that are less widely known today, such as the dancer Florence Waren, whose story is part of the inspiration for The Paris Dancer.
Born Sadie Rigal in South Africa in 1917 – she later changed her name for the stage – Florence arrived in Paris in 1938, determined, like many young dancers at the time, to join one of the Ballet Russe companies. But in order to pay her rent, while she waited for her big break, she auditioned for the Bal Tabarin, where she danced, at first, in the ensemble.
There, Florence was fortunate to work for the artistic director, Pierre Sandrini, who, in 1939, could see the writing on the wall, and encouraged the young Jewish dancer to audition for Colonel Wassily de Basil’s company in London – to get her out of the continent where Hitler’s forces were advancing. And so, in the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition, Florence was offered a place in De Basil’s Ballet Russe. The plan was for her to be picked up by the company in France that winter. But when war was declared in September 1939, their travel plans changed and Florence was stranded in France.
A resilient and determined individual, Florence refused to let this defeat her, even after the Nazis occupied Paris. She never registered as Jewish, and in the early 1940s, she formed a successful ballroom partnership with a dancer called Frederic Apcar, with whom she toured the prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, along with the likes of Edith Piaf and Charles Trenet. But her life as a well-known dancer also offered her opportunities to work for the Resistance and to protect Jewish families – acts of unimaginable courage for a Jewish woman flying under the radar in an occupied city.
While The Paris Dancer is partly inspired by Florence and her fellow performers, it is a work of fiction. Alongside the wartime narrative, we follow the modern-day story of Mim, a young writer, who travels to New York to sort out the affairs of her great-aunt, Esther. Among her papers, Mim finds a memoir of Esther’s years in Occupied Paris, in which she shares her memories of her best friend, an ambitious dancer at the Bal Tabarin.
Unlike Florence, I’m no pro, but I truly love to dance.
Many decades and miles separated me from Florence, but one thing we shared was a deep love of dance. I have watched, interviewed and written about dancers for two decades. And although I’m a social rather than a professional dancer, the art form has been life-changing for me. It was a real pleasure to be able to weave into the novel my enormous admiration for dancers, who really are the toughest of people. In essence, their art involves making something impossibly difficult look effortless and light – and there was a clear parallel in the Resistance work Florence was doing.
In other ways, my personal life fed into the novel. Mim is on the run from grief, which follows her to New York, even as she investigates its ballrooms and dance classes with the help of a handsome young dancer. During the course of writing The Paris Dancer, I, too, lost a dear friend and family member, my brother-in-law Olav, to whom the novel is dedicated. Like Mim, dance, as well as writing, became one of the ways I began to process what my family and I had gone through.
I can’t remember who said it, but writing a novel can sometimes feel like putting real plums into a fake pie. If that’s the case then the plums were my grief, my deep love of dance and the extraordinary life and courage of Florence Waren and her friends. The resulting pie is The Paris Dancer. I hope you enjoy your time at the Bal Tabarin.
