“I want a definite juxtaposition on stage,” explains filmmaker Azhur Saleem. “You have the Marionette Unit: this monstrous, chaotic thing that resembles a gutted church-organ. And attached to it is the absolute antithesis to this: a style of dance that represents grace, beauty and an ethereal quality.”

That’s why it’s three enslaved ballerinas that are fused with this machine and forced to perform in his upcoming film The Marionette Unit.

Currently in pre-production in London, The Marionette Unit is a science fiction film set in an alternate Victorian England. Azhur says it draws on a wide variety of sources, including novels like G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the films of Ridley Scott, and comic books like the Jack the Ripper saga From Hell. The original inspiration for the story, however, came when his brother pointed him to a YouTube video.

“It was video of someone who had taken apart a grand piano and re-purposed it, attaching an LED to every piano hammer, and little motors controlling the whole thing. This whole ‘machine’ was then linked to a laptop. You’d click play and the whole thing would whirr to life. I wanted to film something around this and pretty soon it became apparent that I didn’t want to just shoot the machine – I wanted a story around this fascinating device.”

And why ballet? “The style of dance has to represent self-expression and creativity. These can be very fragile things, and ballet represents them visually. On the other side, the machine represents the state and control.” Azhur admits he’s quite new to the world of dance, but was recently “blown away” by Zero Degrees by Akram Khan. “Again, what hit me was the joining of two styles – in this case West and East. If I can get half of the energy and vitality of the performances in my film, I will be happy.”

Azhur and his co-creators are currently working on a short version of the film, and hope to move onto a full-length feature soon after. For a teaser trailer, concept art, and more, visit the official website.

Image:(C) Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe

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.

French-born, Melbourne-raised director Philippe Mora is responsible for many of Australia’s infamous cult movies of the 1970s and 1980s. But did you know he’s responsible for one of the most memorable ballet sequences ever to appear on film?

Mora’s films often exhibited a theatrical flair. His first feature film, for example, was the “Bretchian musical” Trouble in Molopolis, filmed during the height of London bohemia. Later, he made The Return of Captain Invincible, starring an alcoholic superhero who sings and dances while resisting temptation.

When Mora got his hands on the second sequel of horror franchise The Howling, however, he transformed it into a uniquely Australian satire. (There’s even a cameo by Dame Edna Everage.) Howling III: The Marsupials’ 1987 ballet scene goes like this:

Olga, a ballerina defecting from Russia (played by Dagmar Bláhová), is in her dressing room at Sydney’s Opera House. She says: “I don’t think I should dance tonight. I feel … strange.” Later, rehearsing on stage, she pirouettes – and with each rotation, she sprouts more hair, her face elongating into a snout, until she’s a fully-fledged werewolf in a pretty red dress. Her fellow dancers start screaming, but the male lead, oblivious, jumps into her waiting maw.

It’s a scene that even the New York Times review had to grudgingly describe as “spiffy”.

Introducing ‘Divertissements‘, a new series which sees pop-culture critic Martyn Pedler explore ballet’s strange cameo role in film and TV.

Early film pioneer George Méliès was not only a director; he was a magician and mad scientist too. One of his cinematic obsessions was with the “pliability of the body”,  having it transform, change size, break into pieces, or disappear entirely.

His favourite bodies to use in creating these special effects? Those of ballerinas belonging to companies like Théâtre du Châtelet and the Folies Bergère.

In 1902, he created La Danseuse microscopique, unfortunately translated as The Dancing Midget. It shows a magician producing an egg that hatches a tiny ballerina. One year later, he made Le rêve d’un maître de ballet, or The Ballet-Master’s Dream. Melies plays a man frustrated with his attempts to create a ballet, and dreams of ever-transforming dancers atop his bed.

Ballerinas aren’t quite as obvious in his most famous creation, 1902’s Le voyage dans la lune, or A Trip To The Moon. Widely regarded as the first science fiction film, its image of a human-faced moon with a rocket shoved uncomfortably into its eye is iconic.

Méliès may not have found room for actual dancing, but dancers appear nonetheless. The last thing the space-faring astronomers of A Trip To The Moon see on earth are ballerinas waving them goodbye; the first thing they see on arrival are the same unearthly beauties, appearing in the moon’s sky as if by magic.

How many of those attending The Australian Ballet’s performances of Stanton Welch’s The Sleeping Beauty saw it through flitting childhood afterimages of Disney’s animated fairytale?

Walt Disney earned himself an eternal place in certain girlish hearts with his so-called ‘Princess Trilogy’: Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). In fact, any online search for ‘Disney’ and ‘Ballet’ produces a torrential downpour of merchandise including costumes, toys, and pointe shoes emblazoned with Tinkerbell. It suggests that all young girls want to be princesses, ballerinas, or – preferably – both at once.

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is now considered a watershed moment in the history of animation, but at the time it was a high-stakes gamble. Throughout the 1950s, animated features were losing money for the studio and, according to one animator , Disney had gone so far as to suggest that the feature animation department may be closed down. Disney decided to throw all of his resources – creative and financial – behind the production of Sleeping Beauty. In doing so, he created something hailed almost universally as a masterpiece.

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty cleverly adapts the Tchaikovsky ballet from 1890, mixing in a more modern sense of adolescent romance. The fact that it is the last Disney film to use individually hand-inked cells give the visuals an idiosyncratic texture that hasn’t been captured since. Sleeping Beauty cost more than six million dollars in 1959, and was the last film that Walt Disney personally supervised.

The connection between Disney and the world of dance is more profound than just a shared love of the same fairytales. Back in 1940, he released the musical Fantasia in an attempt to bring music usually considered ‘high art’ to mainstream America. It took classical music and let animators run riot with images to accompany it – perhaps most famously, Mickey’s war with brooms to Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Read the rest of this entry »

A cowboy fires his gun at the ground near another’s feet and demands: “Dance!” It’s a cliché that might be familiar more thanks to the Bugs Bunny cartoons that parodied it than the old westerns that inspired it. In the realm of folktales, however, being forced to dance is more likely to be the result of a magic spell than the threat of gunplay.

Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale The Red Shoes – the subject of the fictional ballet within Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s movie of the same name – features a young woman who finally dons a particular pair of shiny red shoes only to find that she can’t take them off. Worse, they won’t stop dancing. She is forced to beg an executioner to sever her feet with his axe; the shoes, with her bloody feet still inside, continue to dance. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Shoes was the top-grossing British film released in America for almost four decades, earning a vocal cheerleader in Martin Scorsese. In fact, the legendary auteur is so taken with the film that he collects its memorabilia. It’s easy to see why.

Hungry young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), and up-and-coming ballerina Vicky Page (Moira Shearer, of the Royal Ballet) attract the attention of heartless impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). Lermontov is determined that “life is so unimportant” compared to true art. Based in part on Sergei Diaghilev, Walbrook plays Lermontov with formidable cool, all smirks and glares. Will Vicky choose love, or art?

While the backstage melodrama is rendered in otherworldly technicolour, it’s nothing compared to the film’s ballet centrepiece: a ballet based on Hans Christian Anderson’s macabre tale of The Red Shoes, in which a girl is magically forced to dance until her death. Choreographed by Robert Helpmann and Leonide Massine – who both also act in the film – the ballet begins viewed almost as a live performance, but we slowly move closer to the action until we’re inside Vicky’s mind. As the intensity builds, her reality is transformed with striking, expressionistic effects.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes combines the decidedly theatrical with the jaw-droppingly cinematic, creating a tragedy that – 60 years later – still feels somehow new.