By Rachel Straus<\/p>\n
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How many ballet clich\u00e9s can one film hold? Answer: Enough to make you puke. And that is what Natalie Portman spends a fair amount of time doing in \u201cBlack Swan,\u201d the pulp ballet movie directed by Darren Aronofsky, which opened December 3. Portman, who plays Nina Sayers, a corps member of a ballet company, isn\u2019t just a bulimic. Like her historic predecessor Victoria Page in the film \u201cRed Shoes\u201d (1948), La Danse<\/em> makes her bonkers. Ballet, as the old clich\u00e9 goes, demands a ballerina\u2019s complete subjugation of pleasure. And so the normal desires of a young woman\u2014a love life, some independence and autonomy\u2014are as remote to Nina as a good meal.<\/p>\n In \u201cBlack Swan\u201d the protagonist is pain, not this rising dancer Nina. The foil is satire: Nina lives in a pink room among stuffed animals and a tinkling ballerina music box. Whether in the studio or at home she is everyone\u2019s punching bag. Is she an artist? No way. She\u2019s a tool. And when she uses a primitive one to kill herself, she says with a smile \u201cI felt it.\u201d Meaning that she finally understands the dual demands required of the ballerina performing the lead in the late 19th<\/sup> century ballet \u201cSwan Lake:” The White Swan is the virgin and sacrificial lamb; the Black Swan is the whore and murderer (according to Aronofsky). Nina dies with a smile on her face knowing she was both. Now that\u2019s morbidly pathetic. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Why does Nina dance? Where as Victoria Page (played by Royal Ballet principal Moira Shearer) answers this question in \u201cRed Shoes\u201d with the poise of a peacock\u2014telling her future boss that it\u2019s as necessary as living\u2014no one bothers to ask Nina why she\u2019s willing to endure the mental and physical demands of a highly disciplined life. This lack of character development strikes at the heart of Aronofsky\u2019s problematic ballet flick. The director possesses zero admiration for anyone striving to be an athlete and<\/em> an artist before they reach their 30th<\/sup> birthday. There is no convincing footage demonstrating how dancers fall in love with the possibility of becoming art. Bone-thin Portman, who is on screen 99 percent of the time, isn\u2019t a dancer. How could she demonstrate the joy and power of dancing? The fact that American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane is her dancing double doesn\u2019t help. Lane is shot from the calf down or at distance that makes her look like a specter.<\/p>\n Aronofsky got one thing right: Dancers experience pain (subsuming themselves to the aesthetic and physical demands of their art form). But in \u201cBlack Swan,\u201d pain is the trope to drive home Aronofsky\u2019s plot in which Nina transforms into a swan\u2014scales and all. Nina\u2019s transformation is gory and sadistic. She mutilates (until she loses finger nails, cracks her bones, and plunges glass into her belly). She is sexually exploited and victimized (in hopes of becoming a more sensual dancer). All the while she goes mad (seeing things and imagining others).<\/p>\n Aronofsky recently told the media that he was surprised that the ballet world didn\u2019t roll out the red carpet, when he announced that he would be making a dance film that would take \u201cSwan Lake\u201d and turn it into a gore fest where female dancers are featured as sex-starved or sex-crazed victims of male power. Perhaps those who were asked to be Aronofsky\u2019s consultants caught his previous film, \u201cThe Wrestler\u201d (2008). \u00a0<\/span>In it an aging pro wrestler (Mickey Rourke) is addicted to being pumped, popping pills, and being applauded for getting pulverized. At the end of \u201cBlack Swan,\u201d Nina dances \u201cSwan Lake,\u201d whipping her standing leg in perfect circles while her working leg rises up and down on pointe (fuettes<\/em>). The crowd roars as though she\u2019s Hulk Hogan at a Las Vegas World Wrestling Championship.<\/p>\n Following in the tradition of slasher movies and exploitation films, \u201cBlack Swan\u201d is particularly American because it thumbs its nose at high art and its earnest, eccentric, obsessive purveyors. With this in mind, critics reviewed \u201cBlack Swan\u201d favorably. Vincent Cassel as the sadistic ballet company chief, Barbara Hershey as the \u201cMommy Dearest\u201d mother, and Winona Ryler as the aging, raging Ballerina are appropriately monstrous and consequently entertaining. But why New York City Ballet principal dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied signed on to play The Prince continues to pain me. My guess is that his decision has something to do with money and a lot to do with Natalie Portman, who is now his girlfriend.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Another film that involves dance, but will not get the kind of publicity as the Portman vehicle is Greg Vander Veer\u2019s. At Symphony Space on December 6 in conjunction with Martha Hill Dance Fund, Vander Veer screened an excerpt of his work-in-progress documentary on the dance pioneer Martha Hill (1900-1995).<\/p>\n Hill\u2019s impact on modern dance education in America was equal to Serge Diaghilev\u2019s impact on ballet performance in Europe, writes\u00a0Janet Mansfield Soares (Wesleyan University Press, 2009). The former Martha Graham dancer created dance departments at New York University, Bennington College, and The Juilliard School. She helped foster dozens of others around the world. She organized the first summer seasons of what is now the American Dance Festival.<\/p>\n In her recent biography of Hill, Soares unearths and reveals Hill\u2019s gargantuan mission to make the nascent modern dance movement as viable as the 400-hundred-year-old ballet tradition. The focus of Vander Veer\u2019s documentary excerpt and Soares\u2019s book is Hill\u2019s battle to bring modern dance (in combination with ballet training) to Lincoln Center, where The Juilliard School was in the process of creating a state-of-the-art, performing arts headquarters.<\/p>\n The problem for Hill and her dance department was the New York City Ballet. Under the executive leadership of Lincoln Kirstein (whose connection to power was that of an oligarch), City Ballet demanded the dance portion of the Juilliard building for its School of American Ballet. At the panel, former Juilliard dance student Risa Steinberg talked about the debacle. Steinberg, now the Associate Director of the Juilliard Dance Division, described how she and fellow students stood outside the State Theater and asked people to sign a petition to keep her school alive. \u201cThe voices of all these other people became as loud as Balanchine\u2019s money,\u201d said Steinberg. In the end, the dance division prevailed. But the story is much larger than City Ballet versus Juilliard\u2019s dance department. It\u2019s about the ongoing battle between ballet and modern dance for money, theaters, and audiences. The details are ugly. The personalities are colossal. I hope this film by Greg Vander Veer and his young associates gets made.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n