Don Quixote

Speaking of Toronto, the whole reason for the Toronto trip was for the ballet. For Christmas 2010, I received tickets to Don Quixote from my friend Shannon (as did our friend Leah) and we decided to make a day of it. Other than the pluvial weather, the day was perfect - coffee, shopping, fine dining - and we finished it off with fouettés and grand jetés on stage. It was delicious.

 

Photo courtesy of The Toronto Star

Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos (the scene above is from the third act but I think the setting for our final act was much better). I wish we could've because the costumes were sensational. The last time I went the the Four Seasons Centre for a performance by the National Ballet of Canada, it was for Romeo and Juliet. I was so excited because I'd just seen the company's Nutcracker (spectacular, by the way) and I love Prokofiev's music so I was expecting so much but the production was just so lo-fi. They reused the same sets over and over again - for the bedroom, for the ballroom, for the outdoor scenes, for the balcony scene - it was embarrassing.

So for Don Quixote, I was expecting the same. I thought to myself, 'perhaps the company invests in The Nutcracker because they know it sells well and for the rest of the season, they just scrimp a little,' but no, they went all out for Don Quixote. Perhaps it's because it's such a jovial ballet and they needed to infuse the stage with colours and wild sets and props?

I liked how the dancers utilized other props - like instruments, fans, clapping, snapping - whilst dancing. It really contributed to the Spanish tone of the ballet. I also think the ballet would've improved a lot if they had just had another week or two of rehearsals. There was way too much un-synchronicity and when one person's always off on the dancing, it kind of doesn't work for me. Their cohesiveness really should be perfect. And finally, the last act was odd. There was no concluding narrative in the third act; it was simply the two main dancers (and main characters), Kitri and Basilio, doing solo after solo, trying to one-up the previous one and trying to garner as much applause as possible. We were clapping pretty much the entire third act.

But overall, it was very enjoyable.

J

Black Swan

As many of you will learn, I absolutely adore ballet. I'm not a dancer but I revere ballet as an exquisite art form and respect the dancers who spend their lives honing their skills. It's an art form that apotheosizes the grotesque human body and transforms it into an object of divine aspiration. Why else do ballerinas dance en pointe, if not to elevate them higher and higher, closer and closer to the zenith of mortality?

With that in mind, I saw Black Swan about a month ago. I read and followed all the hype surrounding this movie for a good year or so and was expecting way too much from this film. I wanted so badly to love this film.


Natalie Portman studied dance when she was younger and she trained really hard prior to filming. Despite all her hard work, the skills were mediocre. For a film about ballet, there was very little ballet dancing. The camera lingers too long on her face and arms - arms which are far from principal dancer calibre - and doesn't delve deep enough into the douleur exquise that is ballet. And isn't that what Aronofsky tries to elucidate?


I shouldn't be nitpicky about the dancing because it's a film, not a ballet production, but I found that in addition to the poor ballet, the script was also poor, and for me, that's a dealbreaker. The overdone cliches had not an ounce of cleverness or wit to them. Caricatures only become compelling when they've been subverted by complex emotions or contradictory psychologies but Aronosfky's characters are all one-note players who spew nothing but tired cliches. Vincent Cassel's character, Thomas Leroy, the salacious, egotistical ballet director, was chock-full of these horrible, asinine quotes. The awful script read like a high school drama club play.


A friend of mine, trying to counter my position, said that "Aronofsky uses his scripts to create visuals" and that in Black Swan, "the mix of digital technique and mise-en-scene are spectacular . . . Dance as metaphor, which is Aronofsky's medium, is a more palpable way to approach ballet for a guy." And in that, I agree with him and everything he mentions in terms of the film as a cinematic medium. I do love Nina's complicated relationship with her mother. Although there was very little dialogue in that relationship, everything about it (the infantilization of Nina, the mother's vicarious thrills, their mutual obsession with ballet) is communicated superbly through set design, music, body language, props, etc.

And although I'm impartial to the doppelganger motif, I really enjoyed the extended metaphor of the black swan and the manifestation of the psyche on the body, not only in the form of self-destruction for the sake of art (bulimia, bloody toes), but also, in self-destruction as an entirely free agent of its own. It would've been easy for the film to have just been a documentation of Nina's transformation into the evil black swan but what I liked was the interrogation of the camera's perspective. We don't know if she's consciously or unconsciously expediting her transformation. I realized this when someone asked me: "Does she know she's scratching herself?" That ambiguity of whether or not she's crazy made Nina's character a little bit more interesting than the others.

A ballet movie that I'd have to recommend would be Michael Powell's and Emeric Pressburger's masterpiece, The Red Shoes, a film based on the fairy tale by Hans Christan Anderson.


Similar story (the film was made in 1948 so I expected a 2010 film to have updated the story a little bit) but it's been overturned by the inventiveness of the directors. And if you like ballet, there's an entire dance sequence in the middle of the film (it must be at least 20 minutes long). I highly recommend this British classic over Aronofsky's dark fluff.

J