When you hear the term synchronised swimming you may very well think of plastic women doing water aerobics in a swimming pool. They wear silly pegs on their noses and are crowned with evangelical smiles. But at the start of the 20th century, the sport was known as Water Ballet, named after the beautiful underwater dance sequences  that Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman performed in glass tanks at variety theatre shows throughout the UK and the USA.

Kellerman was successful across a number of fields, including swimming, fashion, film (where she often starred as a mermaid), and sport. One of the highlights of her career was replacing Anna Pavlova in The Big Show of 1916 at New York’s hippodrome. She was everything a modern woman should be – self-possessed, independent and active.

Kellermann is also credited with popularising the one piece swimsuit for women, after she was arrested for indecency in 1907. Her crime? Flaunting her bare legs on Revere Beach in Boston. Oh, the scandal!

Her biography is told to great effect in the 1952 MGM musical, The Million Dollar Mermaid, starring actor Esther Williams  (herself a champion swimmer). It belonged to a sub-genre called aquatic musicals whose spectacularly elaborate underwater production numbers paved the way for the fantasy film genre. The Million Dollar Mermaid’s splashy, hyperreal aquacades were choreographed by Busby Berkeley and featured Williams rising out of a  cascading waterfall amidst a backdrop of gold lamé-suited mermaids, all spinning and spiraling like tangoing starfish to create a kaleidoscope of human pattern and movement. Production values included vast plumes of coloured smoke, fearless trapeze acts, and bathing beauties shooshing down waterslides lined with flag-waving and skimpily clad modern day gods.  In another memorable scene, Esther plays a pearl-like mermaid in a white tutu who treats us to a cross between an underwater pole dance and a classical ballet  before retreating to the clandestine chamber of a giant clam shell.

“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”.

Picture this: Mikhail Baryshnikov in a dusty room, being seduced by a red-lipped grim reaper. He throws himself onto wooden furniture and is eventually coerced into committing suicide. This is the opening sequence to Taylor Hackford’s 1985 film White Knights in which Nikolai Rodchenko (Baryshnikov) and evil Colonel Chaiko mimic the two rival nations – Russia and the US – during the Cold War.

What follows is a drama slash dance film set in Leningrad, starring Baryshnikov alongside tap great Gregory Hines. Paralleling aspects of his own life, Baryshnikov plays Russian dancer and defector to the US Nikolai Rodchenko. Nikolai’s plane is forced to land in Russia, leaving him a prisoner to the evil Colonel Chaiko. Hines plays an American expatriate who becomes involved with Nikolai’s plight to escape Russia’s Orwellian society and return to America.
There is romance, car chases and a soundtrack from the likes of Lionel Ritchie, all punctuated by intelligent and powerful dance scenes. Highlights include Baryshnikov’s passionate solo to Vysotsky in a deserted Mariinsky Theatre and his infamous pirouette gamble. Hines bets Baryshnikov eleven-Rubles in exchange for eleven pirouettes. They are done effortlessly. Blink and you’ll miss them.

While you may have seen Baryshnikov’s acting abilities as Carrie Bradshaw’s ‘lover’ in the final season of Sex and the City, it is truly amazing to see his acting talent alongside his natural talent: dance.

Marissa Shirbin was a dancer, is now a romancer and an editorial assistant at Right Angle Publishing

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.

It takes a visionary artist to transform a dance film into a sublime celluloid experience that stands alone. Fortunately the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s performance of Dracula provided the perfect basis for a silent film. Canadian Director Guy Maddin’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) sets the ballet within a melange of silent film imagery that unfolds like a dream sequence. Maddin, who is best known for his surreal reworkings of vintage aesthetics and silent films harking back to the 1920s and ’30s, has merged theatre, film and ballet to create a phantasmagoric experience for ballet and Dracula lovers alike.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary incorporates the choreography of Mark Godden, a diverse legacy of film imagery and Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. The Royal Winnipeg’s ballerinas also prevail as cast members in this production. Principal dancer Tara Birtwhistle plays Lucy Westenra, whose desires are unleashed by the jealous, handsome Chinese goth Dracula (Zhang Wei-Qiang) – who, in this version, is an immigrant from the east. Elements of pantomime dominate the first half of the film, before giving way to dance scenes that immerse us in the lyricism of the story. Lucy’s pas de deux with Dracula is the most sensual dance-with-death I’ve seen – forget about Halloween parties. The second half sees Mina (Cindy Marie-Small) pursued by Dracula in a seductively savage ballet filled with stake-wielding henchman. This is where the film’s eroticism and Grand Guignol style of horror are brought to the fore.

The cinematography gives tremendous depth to the set of Castle Dracula, which come alive with the shadows and haunting figures that lurk within Gustav Mahler’s nocturnes. Maddin used Super 8 and 16mm film and devices such as vaseline lenses, triple exposure, tinting, animation and title overlays to replicate the golden era of cinema’s staging of melodrama in expressionistic settings (in this case, a mansion Jean Cocteau would be at home in).

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary works well precisely because it is silent: Maddin is used to focusing on the intensity of actors’ faces in the absence of sound to tell a story; large parts of the film are expressed through ballet and Maddin’s felicity of style gives it the intensity and beauty it deserves.

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 »

When acclaimed Australian director Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, Driving Miss Daisy) set out to bring the story of China’s most famous ballet dancer to the screen he had a difficult call to make – who would play the inimitable Li Cunxin: an actor or a dancer?

Adapted by Academy-Award nominated screenwriter Jan Sardie (Shine, The Notebook) from Cunxin’s best-selling autobiography, Mao’s Last Dancer wasn’t written as a few limp plot points to peg some grande jetés on. The drama of Cunxin’s journey hinges on the stark disparity between his impoverished childhood and the slavish apprenticeship he served at Madame Mao’s Beijing Dance Academy; and the freedom and riches he found on some of the world’s most prestigious ballet stages in the West. Read the rest of this entry »

I myself eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement and only feel it. This is what dancers do, but instead I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside of myself to see what I’d got. I came to realise that this feeling had to come out of myself; not out of streams, swaying grasses, soaring birds ... Len Lye.

Every film has its own rhythm, but how many of them engage with the essence of human movement, and of dance? New Zealand Artist Len Lye was interested in the composition of motion, just as musicians compose sound, from a young age. It was Lye, in fact, who coined the phrase ‘Visual music’.

The story goes that Lye as a young boy was watching clouds drift past and considering the way John Constable used to draw clouds to try to convey their motion. “Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? All of a sudden it hit me – if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion.”

Applying principles of human kinetics to his many innovations in film and sculpture, Lye saw movement as ‘unpremeditated being; the uncritical expression of life’. Colours and forms embody rather than emulate movement, an idea he called ‘pure figures of motion’. We see this to mesmerising effect in the zig-zagging rhythms of Free Radicals (1958) set to the tribal drums of Africa’s Bagirmi Tribe. The creativity of indigenous art and dance, particularly that of the southwest Pacific, was a profound influence on Lye’s work.

A pioneer of ‘direct films’ (created without a camera), and ‘direct animation’ (hand-marking film), Lye favoured techniques such as airbrushing paint through stencils, batik, dyeing, scratching and etching. In A Colour Box (1935), a kaleidoscope of vibrant geometric shapes flutter and unfurl into lines that wiggle to the seductive rhythms of Cuban jazz.

A Rainbow Dance (1936) overlays shot footage with vivid colour effects. The narrative follows a playful itinerant (Rupert Doone), who moves through a hallucinatory landscape with the outlaw style of Fred Astaire. Pink fish jump over curling waves, a magenta silhouette of a gentleman plays tennis on a court that stretches out to the horizon like a desert highway, and multiple figures dance across a backdrop of laughing rainbows.

An Artist in Perpetual Motion continues at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until October 11 2009.

Hard knocks and sweat bands at performing arts school; New York gangs at war, fighting each other with adrenalin-fuelled dance moves; a casino dance floor where love prevails. Countless stories have been told through dance films, and we’ve all got our favourites. To honour dance on the silver screen, The Australian Ballet’s Artistic Director David McAllister has cherry-picked three of his favourite dance films, which will screen between 11 – 13 September for the Sydney Opera House’s season of Spring Dance. Read on to find out which films got his toes tapping as a young dancer. “I was so excited to be asked to choose some of my favourite dance films,” David says. “The hardest decision was which ones to leave out.”

Swing Time
Of the ten films that Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire made together, Swing Time was Ginger’s favourite. They made an electric pair, dancing ballroom numbers with feather-light footwork, performing some of the most memorable roles in Hollywood. Often Fred would forbid filming to cease until he was happy with the take, even if Ginger’s feet were bloody and raw. In Swing Time, the dance number ‘Never Gonna Dance’ took 47 takes in one day until Fred deemed it good enough to print.
Friday 11 September

West Side Story
“Boy, boy, crazy boy, get cool, boy!  Got a rocket in your pocket, keep coolly cool, boy!”
When beloved choreographer Jerome Robbins pitched West Side Story to Leonard Bernstein he sold his idea as a contemporary musical adaption of Romeo and Juliet, focusing on the conflict between Italian-American Roman Catholic and Jewish families in New York. The result? A hot-blooded teenage love affair, a neverending brawl between two Lower East Side gangs and big, bawdy musical hits coloured with Jerome’s character-filled dancing.
Saturday 12 September

Fame!
Pastel-hued tights, headbands damp with sweat and backflips across the screen: Fame! defined the 80s dance flick like no other, and the classic lives on. Later this year a remake of Fame! will be released to cinemas worldwide. It’s hard to imagine it’ll beat the classic 1980 film, though, where the New York High School of Performing Arts is the best place to be if you’re into gyrating dance sequences during lunch hour, and cartwheels off car bonnets.
Sunday 13 September