Posts by Martyn Pedler

Welcome to the next in our series of ‘Divertissements’, in which pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler explores ballet’s strange cameo role in film and TV. You can read an earlier instalment here …

Like so much film noir before it, 1955’s Killer’s Kiss is a story of a violent man in a violent city, undone by a good deed for a beautiful girl. Right in its middle, however, is a striking ballet sequence that informs everything before and after.

Davey is a boxer – solid fists, weak jaw – who becomes embroiled in the life of Gloria, a beautiful girl who lives in his New York apartment block. It’s Gloria’s tragic backstory that allows director Stanley Kubrick to place Ruth Sobotka on stage, if only in flashback. Sobotka was Kubrick’s second wife at the time of shooting, but she’d been dancing for years with George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet. She not only danced in Jerome Robbins’ infamous, insect-themed ballet The Cage – she also designed the costumes. (more…)

Welcome to the next in our series of ‘Divertissements’, in which pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler explore ballet’s strange cameo role in film and TV. You can read the earlier instalments here and here.

One of the benefits of writing a TV series about an immortal vampire is that the character’s history can stretch back hundreds of years. In ‘Waiting in the Wings‘, a 2002 episode of Angel, the titular vampire is excited about a touring ballet company who bring their production of Giselle to Los Angeles. He says he first saw them perform in 1890 and “cried like a baby,” adding, “and I was evil!”

When he and his friends attend the ballet in question, Angel realises that it’s not just the choreography that’s the same. It’s the cast, too. They’ve been cursed by a jealous fan to forever repeat the same performance, step by step. As the prima ballerina – played by Summer Glau – says: “I don’t dance. I echo.” Of course, Angel and his team fight to end the curse, and their backstage demon-fighting counterpoints the ballet’s onstage grace.

‘Waiting in the Wings’ was Glau’s first TV role. Despite her years as a ballerina, she later explained, it provided her first opportunity to dance Giselle “in real life”. Angel’s creator, Joss Whedon, went on to cast Glau in a major role in his short-lived (but much loved) sci-fi TV series Firefly. For those who would prefer to see her dance again, Whedon has also been promising to create a short ballet for the screen called The Serving Girl.

A young dancer, inexperienced but full of passion and potential, has one chance to make it big. After overcoming unexpected (often romantic) obstacles, the dancer gives a final performance, exceeding all expectations before a cheering crowd and the credits roll.

You’ve seen this movie. We’ve all seen this movie. It’s the basic template that has been used for almost every dance-related movie in Hollywood memory. And that’s one of the reasons why Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse is so refreshing to watch. It’s a documentary that not only rejects the traditional dance narrative; it does away with traditional narrative altogether.

Wiseman is a veteran filmmaker, famed for documentaries without voiceovers, without interviews. He simply shoots – around 130 hours of footage, in this case – and then painstakingly shapes the film in editing. The result is a fly-on-the-wall recreation of the daily life of the Paris Opera Ballet.

Despite its title, La Danse isn’t only about dance. We see fabric stitched and sliced, crystals glued to costume jewellery, food served in the cafeteria, and even cleaners vacuuming after a grand performance. We eavesdrop on discussions of retirement benefits, visiting donors, and “what Americans like”. (more…)

Only moments after the trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan appeared online, internet wits had already dubbed it Single White Ballerina. Like Barbet Schroeder’s smash 1992 film Single White Female, Black Swan appears to be the story of a young woman (Natalie Portman) whose identity is usurped by an obsessed competitor. Here, the women are ballerinas, and their contest is for the affections of their choreographer as well as his leading roles.

The psycho-sexual relationship between the dancers hinted at in the trailer comes as no surprise; it’s almost a requirement of the genre. Equally, the overbearing mother – here seen painfully cropping her daughter’s fingernails – is a familiar role. (And one that will soon be played for black comedy, too. A just-announced independent comedy called Dance of the Mirlitons focuses on a ballet-mother who is determined to make her daughter famous, no matter what it takes.) (more…)

Over the past decade, more and more films have been transformed into musical theatre: Hairspray, Legally Blonde, The Full Monty, and even an off-Broadway version of the cult horror movie Evil Dead.

It’s less common, however, for a hit film to inspire a successful ballet, as did Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. The tragic story of an unfinished outsider, attempting to find a place within suburbia while unable to touch anything within it, was adapted by Matthew Bourne – most famous for his smash-hit all-male version of Swan Lake.

In a 2005 interview, Bourne explained how it took years to convince filmmakers to give permission for this re-telling of Edward’s story. Tim Burton then saw a number of Bourne’s works, and finally said: “Take it and do your thing with it.”

This ‘thing’ turned out to be a crowd-pleasing demonstration of Christmas cheese, dancing topiary, and a new ending that Edward’s original screenwriter approved as being better than the original. Of course, Edward’s tale comes with some particular choreographic challenges. (For your information: he lifts his partners with his arms, but never his razor-sharp hands.)

Visitors to the current Tim Burton extravaganza at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image will be reminded that it’s not only his animated musicals like The Nightmare Before Christmas or The Corpse Bride that contain dancing. Just think of the ghost-possessed calypso moves in Beetlejuice; the Joker merrily waltzing as Batman fights for his life in Batman; or even the Mad Hatter’s jig in his recent Alice In Wonderland. (Also for your information: it’s called the Futterwacken.) (more…)