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.

Here she plays Iris, Gloria’s sister, who we’re told was an enormously talented dancer with the Ballets Russes until her father’s illness forced her to first give up her only passion. Gloria delivers this monologue as we watch Iris dance on an empty stage, before an empty audience, the stark black-and-white cinematography capturing her as something too delicate, too perfect for Kubick’s grimy New York City.

Gloria explains that when she was later forced into dancing herself, it wasn’t for the ballet; it was at a seedier establishment that promised swing music and friendly hostesses. She took comfort, though, in one fact: “At least Iris never had to dance like this”.

images: Ruth Sobotka, photographer unknown

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.

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”.

Americans, apparently, like rehearsals – so they’d love this film. La Danse features an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes dance footage. Sometimes single dancers, working alone before mirrors; sometimes whole rooms of ballerinas moving as the voices of off-screen choreographers shout instructions. Whereas most dance movies relegate rehearsals to a quick, inspiring montage or two, La Danse’s two-and-a-half-hour running time allows it to linger in the studio.

(The lengthy duration of the film may prove too much for some, as this hilarious Vanity Fair account  of one spectator’s panic proves.)

Most directors of dance on screen fall prey to using flashy, rapid-cut editing during performances, leaving audiences longing to see the dancers … you know… dance. Wiseman’s observational style bypasses this problem, letting us see not only full dance pieces, but the striking small moments around them – like the look in dancers’ eyes as they wait in the wings, moments from appearing on stage.

La Danse might not be the most obviously thrilling or spectacular, but it could be the truest film about dance ever made.

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.)

But it’s the final moments of Black Swan’s trailer that are fascinating, as Portman’s dancer appears to pluck a single feather from her back – and the film shifts from a psychological thriller to a more visceral sort of horror. It wouldn’t be the first time. 1977’s Suspiria, from Italian horror master Dario Argento, focused on an American dancer discovering an evil force lurking in her ballet academy – resulting in a series of bloody, hallucinogenic, and unforgettable murders.

Ballet and horror also share an interest in bodily transformations. The former tends to treat them as magic; the latter as mutation. But when Aronofsky’s last film, The Wrestler, was a blistering account of the true costs of masculinity, I wonder Black Swan will ask similar questions of femininity. Will the wings of Portman’s ballerina serve the same purpose as the distorted features of Mickey Rourke’s wrestler?

(I also wonder whether her transformation can possibly equal the greatest ballerina movie-monster of all. We’ll have to wait and see.)

Black Swan premieres tonight at the 67th Venice Film Festival and will be released in Australia early 2011

Tim Harbour’s Halcyon began with a single image: a goddess, transformed into a bird, flying like an arrow into a storm. Tim enlisted designer Alexis George to recreate his visions on the ballet stage with a unique collection of danceable, period-style costumes. Martyn Pedler caught up with Alexis to talk about how she began designing costumes for the new ballet.

When Tim first told you the Halcyon story, did images immediately start to turn in your head?
It was actually quite immediate. Especially when the narrative is set in a particular time and place. Greek gods have such a striking visual image, so that was a really great starting point for me.

Tim said that he gathered a folder of images that inspired him during the initial stages of the creative process. Did he bring those to you as well?
Yes, that’s correct. He had a few paintings of the Halcyon goddess and her lover Ceyx. In particular, Tim liked the way the wind swirled the fabric, and the movement that was in the painting.

Is there an example of how you interpreted one of those images into your costumes?
Initially I guess it was more about capturing the feeling and mood of the painting. I did some further research on Zeus and I pulled out some particular design lines from the images I found – though they’re not in the final designs. Research in those initial stages is really important: starting with something, and then moving on from there.

What’s the most exciting stage of this process? Is it the initial brainstorming, the research, or when it begins to take a more definite shape?
Every stage is fantastic, but I think it’s when you start seeing the two-dimensional drawings turn into three-dimensional life on the bodies. That’s quite an amazing feeling. It can be really nerve-wracking; you don’t really know if it’s going to work. Something can look amazing on paper but not on the body. The most exciting part is probably finding the fabrics that speak of the design, and getting that onto the body.

I hadn’t thought of that. So, not only is there the initial step from the paper to the object, there’s another step as it’s put onto the dancer …
Absolutely. A lot can change then, particularly in these designs for Halcyon. I’ve done a lot of cut-outs on the body, with lines that follow the contours of the body really closely for the most flattering look. On paper, I’ve drawn something that I think will be flattering, but I actually need to finish the designs on the body. Kerry, the cutter at The Australian Ballet, is going to create a ‘white’ – what we call a ‘trial’ – to put on the dancer, and then we’ll draw on the dancer’s body where the lines are most flattering to their shape. Designs continue all the way up to opening night, really. There are always little changes.

Has there been a particular challenge that’s come with working on this ballet?
Tim challenged me a lot in the design stages, which was really exciting, because he was still developing things in his head. I kind of developed the designs with him, and he kept pushing me to go further and further in different directions. I’m glad we came up with something that works really beautifully together. But we would have never have got there if he didn’t travel that path. So the design stage was quite a challenge to achieve something we both liked and that fit the design aesthetic, and that was something new as well. It’s quite difficult to recreate the leotard! I had to think outside the box a little bit.

Are you used to people coming to you with more of a concrete idea about the costumes?
I think the difference definitely lies between dance and theatre. In theatre, or opera, you always start with a script or a score. But with dance – especially works like Halcyon, which is newly commissioned – we were all there from step one. As a designer, that’s the way I love to work. You really feel like you can contribute to the overall show through design.

Are there sometimes designs you come up with that you think would be amazing, but know that dancers could never dance in?
Definitely. You’ve got to consider the movement, how light something is, whether it stretches with the body, and what sort of fabric it is. They’re such hard-wearing costumes and get put through a lot. There’s the Melbourne season, and then the Sydney season, so everything has to be made from high-quality fabrics. The Australian Ballet has an incredible wardrobe department and they can produce anything, really. If I came to them with a design that seems impossible to move in, they would somehow make it moveable.

Edge of night plays in Melbourne and Sydney in August and November

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.)

And Burton’s stripped-back, spectacle-first narratives certainly do lend themselves to the stage. Perhaps Bourne’s adaptation was fated since the film’s composer Danny Elfman created a suite for the soundtrack called Ballet de Suburbia. I think, however, it’s because Edward Scissorhands is a perfect modern fairytale – and fairytales have inspired dance since ballet’s very beginnings.

Tim Burton: The Exhibition runs until 10 October at Australian Centre for the Moving Image