Autumn 2025: Het Lichaam is een Kooi by Nicky Runge

The Fall of the Swan:

Facing the World after Personal Trauma

By Nancy van Dongen 

Becoming a ballerina is a dream for many young girls. Dancing in big poofy tutus, being lifted into the air and feeling beautiful are what draw them in. While I have never shared this dream, I understand the draw they feel towards this world. It is the very essence of children to desire positive attention, a way to express themselves and to burn off some energy. 

Most of these girls forget this dream; while some keep it as a hobby, others leave the world of dance behind. Ballet becomes an image of beauty and elegance that we get enchanted by for an evening, without the desire to participate beyond the curtain call. The ballerinas and their (often) white outfits seem to float above the stage, in a world separate from our own. It entices the audience to wonder about what goes on behind the curtains. 

Being a nosy Nancy myself, this sense of mystery behind works of art always entices me. So, when I saw Het Lichaam is een Kooi by Nicky Runge, I could not resist picking it up, especially since the world of dance is a form of art that I struggle to understand. 

Het Lichaam is een Kooi (‘The Body is a Cage’) is the second Dutch novel written by Nicky Runge ¹. She explores the world of ballet: one she is familiar with through the experiences of friends. The book is divided into three sections: “Eerste akte” (First act), “Entr’acte” and “Tweede Akte” (Second act). These sections mimic the book in what role Dominique and the other characters will play in the narrative. With the first act focusing on Dominique who fell in the first act of the performance, the entr’acte bringing focus on the dynamic between Dominique and the dancers of Katsuro’s collective, reflecting the idea of Katsuro to have the entire group dancing for the entr’acte of his show before having the other dancers freeze and disappear into the background for the second act, where both novel and dance focus on the relationship between Dominique and Katsuro.

The book follows the life of Dominique, or Dom to her friends, and the way she must redefine her life at 27, after her leg injury. The book begins during the last performance before Dominique is promoted to first soloist of the Dutch National Ballet. During the performance, her mind is restless, and her body is resisting more than usual, resulting in a fall that breaks her leg, along with her dreams. It soon becomes clear that she will never be able to dance ballet again for her own well-being, as the strain of standing en pointe would be too much for her leg. This puts her in a position where, for the first time, she has to decide for herself what she will do with her life. 

This new opportunity scares Dominique, as she is pressured by her surroundings to continue a career in the world of ballet as an instructor. Dominique, however, desires to keep dancing and to avoid any situation that could lead to her becoming like her late mentor, Pjotr, who committed suicide once his body started failing him. When she gets invited to witness a performance of the Katsuro dance collective, she falls in love with the dance. She sees the butō dance style of this group as a way to keep dancing, as it is less straining on the body, and is willing to join this collective, no matter the cost. 

It should come as no surprise that the ballet world is a central figure in Het Lichaam is een Kooi. The book portrays an unflattering image of the lives of professional ballet dancers: from statistics of the ideal ballet body, situations reminding the reader of the #MeToo movement, to the short lifespan of the actual dancing itself. The book effectively shows how strict and suffocating the ballet world can be to anyone who aspires to dance or succeeds in dancing on the stage to some extent in their life.  

The cage 

The metaphor of the ballet world as oppressive and the perfection being a cage is repeatedly throughout the book. Dom often mentions that she feels the world she knew is based upon this idea of perfection. This is now suffocating her, because she herself is no longer perfect. She states that: “to be honest that was all I wanted of a relationship before. Picture perfect. But now that I have it, I feel locked up. Captured. How naïve was I.”. This sentence alone already indicates to the reader that the idea of perfection is to be frowned upon and to embrace imperfections to really live.

However, this same message about perfection is repeated multiple times with slightly different images. While in a state of psychosis, Dominique pleads for her former ballet mentor to stop ruining her life like he ruined his own and critiques her fiancé and his parents because they are rich and public figures. She even comments on the house where “[t]he garden seems to be furnished as some kind of showroom model, not for real use”  and describes her sister-in-law as “a living doll in the glass cage of her own house”. While the reader would be aware of the cage metaphor from the title itself and the first reference, it keeps being pointed out, which makes it feel redundant and obnoxious at times.

This repeated explicit metaphor makes it feel like the reader is treated like a child who is unable to pick up on the clues and therefore has to repeatedly be reminded of this theme. It even came off as condescending, as it felt like the book wanted to hold my hand and show the ‘true’ interpretation of this literary novel. Even though an argument could be made that it is the unreliable narration of Dominique, with all these references being a way for her to calm her fears, the story would have benefitted from a more subtle approach. 

Birds and innocence  

The references towards birds and weightlessness are executed better than those of the cage. They are subtle enough that it does not distract from the main plot. At the same time, it allows for Dom’s ballet roots to continue their way throughout the narrative to tie the three acts together. It also introduces an air of innocence to Dominique’s mental state, which adds an extra layer to her personality. The novel questions this sense of innocence in its use of the colour white. Katsuro, leader of the Katsuro dance collective, performs a dance where he eats a poisonous white oleander, which causes him to crash to the floor after 8 minutes, at which point he gets administered the antidote. Katsuro also uses white rice flour to paint the dancers white to symbolise innocence. “We begin pure, unstained, and little by little during the performance we sweat the white rice flour from our faces, so we slowly reveal our true self”. Thus, it is suggested that even this new dance form is not as innocent as it seems, as harming yourself for art’s sake is acceptable is seen as acceptable. 

Body vs Mind  

While ballet and butō dancing have similarities, they also differ in their attitudes towards what is required to be a good dancer. The divide between ballet and butō resembles the age-old question whether a human is at their core their body or their mind. Ballet seems to suggest that a dancer has to solely be their body, since Pjotr instructed Dom to suppress her thoughts while dancing. She also blames her thoughts for her fall. Not to mention the repeated remark that a ballet dancer is at their prime at 27 and will have to leave their career at 35, when their body becomes less flexible. After this career, they become teachers who are “employed to torture the next generation, to sharpen them for the stage. This while we get to see our body, which we as a kind of self-flagellation have trained to the extreme from our childhood and teenage years, deteriorate”. This view of the body feels somewhat alienating, as not many people are able to turn their thoughts off, which in turn makes the world of ballet feel more alienating. 

There are some sections in the “Entr’acte” that read quite philosophical. It raises questions ranging from why society is obsessed with finding answers to everything to what a meaningful life is. It also has a spiritual aspect, with theories of what dance can be and what it should be, to the idea of summoning gods to temporarily give them control over your body, to exercises of exploring a temple without one’s vision. I found these fragments to be a bit distracting at times. It can be confusing when a character is introducing themselves to Dominique and saying that he knows her, as she is the “great fallen dancer”, to them apologising for being rude, followed by him talking about the Freudian ego that he felt. While these fragments can be distracting, they also fit well in the narrative. The members of Katsuro’s dance collective are philosophical and a bit odd in their actions. It expands the idea that ballet and butō are both separate worlds that Dominique does not quite fit into. 

Nicky Runge is thus successful in creating another philosophical novel. Het Lichaam is een Kooi uses different kinds of dance to portray different philosophical viewpoints. Making readers reflect on their own lives, their values and the value of imperfections. It is also effective in portraying the mental issues that surround a psychotic episode. All while creating a coherent story that reflects the world of dance that goes beyond the stage. The biggest issue of the novel is that it is caged in by the explicitly repeated cage metaphor.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

She/Her

Nancy van Dongen is a student of the MA programme Literature Today at Utrecht University after obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Culture. While willing to give any book a read, she has a soft spot for experimental writing and for the supernatural. When not reading, she can often be found drawing or trying out other creative hobbies to add to her hoard.

1. Due to the novel being in Dutch, all quotations are my own translations. ↩︎