The Undeniable Charm of the Australian Teen TV Drama, Dance Academy

Perhaps because I had recently watched Mao’s Last Dancer and Only When I Dance, and my 11-year-old daughter had recently watched the hit Australian teen series Ocean Girl, Netflix cunningly determined that I would like the hit Australian teen ballet series, Dance Academy. Because I was living on my own for two months and evenings were a bit dull, I succumbed to the suggestion, and before I knew what I was doing, I was deeply, irrevocably involved in the fictional lives of a bunch of teenaged Aussie ballet students at the “National School of Ballet” in Sydney (fact check: the real focus of Australian ballet education is Melbourne, home to both the Australian Ballet and its professional school and the National Theater Ballet School).

The series centers on a girl named Tara Webster who has grown up on a sheep farm somewhere in the verdant hinterlands; our first encounter with her is as she uses the fence of a sheep-pasture as a barre while she does some preparatory warm-ups, concluding with a mindbogglingly limber back-bending port-de-bras. She is apple cheeked and wide eyed, and a bit of a rube; Xenia Goodwin, who plays her, is well cast as this earnest, “I just want to fly” dreamer. After a near miss at the auditions, she is admitted somewhat provisionally to “the National” where she has to wear a fairly ugly purple leotard everyday and the ballet mistress routinely excoriates her and takes away her pointe shoes. At the top of her class is her sour-puss roommate Abigail, in whose mouth butter might well freeze, and somewhere in the middle is Kat, basically Tara’s only friend, whose mother is a famous ballerina , whose father is a choreographer, and whose 17-year-old brother is a dreamboat for whom poor, susceptible Tara falls with a very un-balletic thud. Sammy Lieberman, a nice, smart Jewish kid, is her fellow sufferer in the “worst in class” category (male), while the haughty Christian, another dreamboat, constantly torments her, calling her “training bra” for reasons that don’t bear going into here.

The first season involves all the usual goings-on of teen dramas: Tara’s one-way romance with Kat’s brother is exposed by the nasty bit of business that is Abigail, who has a terrible grasp of basic internet and e-mail ethics. Sammy inexplicably falls for Abigail, though in his falling for her, one comes to like her better, since he’s such a sweet and compelling character that if he likes her there must be something redeemable. Kat struggles with feelings of rejection and inferiority and rebellion and everything else. She is a truly awesome hip-hop dancer. Christian is brooding and troubled and sort of into Tara. Kat’s big brother Ethan finally notices Tara. Some kissing ensues. That kind of thing. The second season focuses on the build-up to a big international ballet competition, but it also involves, among other things, the arrival of a new girl who is a sociopathic manipulator, and all the joy she brings; a new boy who is a goof with a very somber past; new romantic entanglements for all the major characters; motorcycles, long-lost fathers, two funerals, a fringe musical, and an attempt at sexual blackmail. In other words, it gets soapier.

Unlike American teen shows which are literally unbearable, this show is quite engaging even for an adult. The kids are very real, down to such details as occasionally having a visible pimple (not a plot device pimple, a real pimple), and sometimes just acting confused and uncertain. Tara is not such a simpleton that she doesn’t bridle at the mean ballet mistress’ criticisms or even, sometimes, openly object to the treatment. The actress who plays her really nails the clueless, feckless teenager. Maybe she is one. The teacher isn’t such a bad, unfeeling, bitter witch that she doesn’t have an ulterior motive – she sees Tara’s natural ability and wants to push her past the limitations imposed by her second-rate training. Even Abigail, who would in a typical American show be an unredeemable Mean Girl turns out to be far more fragile and unpredictable than one might expect, haunted by both her ambition and her self-perception as not quite good enough and not very smart.

What makes Dance Academy something of a sport among television dramas featuring dance (as if this were a significant category – I can only think of that tiresome ABC Family show, Bunheads, but maybe there are others, and certainly this could be said of films about ballet, too) is that you actually get to see a fair amount of real dancing by real dance students; Xenia Goodwin is a serious ballet student – by the end of the first season it seems entirely plausible that she has risen to the head of the class, partly as a result of hard work, partly because she just “has it” – that uber-flexible back, perfect feet, long legs, elegant neck, expressive torso… (the root of Abigail’s dislike turns out to be this unfair natural advantage). Dena Kaplan, the South African actress who plays Abigail, is probably the best dancer on the show, in real terms; she can act her role as a self-absorbed, insecure, controlling neurotic by executing a technically perfect but emotionally off-key “Aurora” variation, and she is also physically impressive – compact and explosive, but incredibly graceful and lyrical in turn. It turns out she is also a talented singer, and has been cast in Broadway musicals, a skill that is woven into the plot in season two, as she begins to question her singleminded dedication to ballet. Some of the others are quite impressive, too: among the men, the character Ben Tickle, who joins the class in season two, is particularly watchable, especially as a tap dancer. Christian, dreamboat #2, is an agile hip-hop dancer and well cast as the best male dancer in the class. He has elegant lines and a kind of beau-tenebre mien that is well suited to classical ballet.

However, my favorite scenes will always be Tara’s dream sequences in which she is dancing the final solo from The Red Shoes (in the world of Dance Academy this is an actual ballet, not a ballet-within-a-film, but it works well thematically with the plot). The choreography is a bit dull, but Goodwin very effectively interprets it as half-hopeless and half-joyful; when, in the second season, she actually performs the piece (after much resistance), it seems quite believable that she brings the audience to their feet – not only has the significance of this particular solo variation been built up over 52 episodes (they’re short), but given the concatenation of plotlines and the real grief that her character is experiencing, the way she throws herself into the music and the (somewhat lame) choreography is really very moving. I won’t deny it: I cried.

The most compelling character, however, is not one of the girls, but Sammy; played by Tom Green, who is more of an actor than a dancer (he’s great at hip-hop and contemporary, but the director has wisely chosen not to give him much ballet screen time) but who makes this guy just so soulful you want to adopt him and feed him and tell him he’s gonna be okay (he isn’t, actually, but I won’t say more – that would spoil things). Sammy’s relationship with his family – a high-achieving, religiously conservative father who doesn’t understand his eldest son’s desire to dance, a loving but reserved mother, and a younger brother as full of anger and aggression as Sammy is full of love and kindness – is very subtly portrayed. When Sammy’s grandfather dies, we get to see the full complexity of the parent-child tie as he comforts his father at once for the loss of his own father and for the loss of the son he imagined (a doctor, not a dancer). Sammy’s joy in dancing is palpable, and he manages to be a really sympathetic, often comic character without being that annoying stock figure from American teen drama, the best boy buddy, who comforts the female protagonists in their romantic crises while pining after them with nerdy, hopeless devotion. For one, Sammy’s sexuality is a little more complicated than that (in the second season he actually comes out to his friends and has a boyfriend, but at the same time you can see him wondering if this identity, too, is a bit constrictive); and also, while he is a “buddy” it’s more because he’s building around himself the protection of a new family, one that is more positive and more accepting than his real family. When he says to Christian, in season two, “These girls are my sisters,” it’s really not in the least corny; he means it and we believe it.

Things don’t always go well for Sammy; of all the characters he probably suffers the most angst, the most humiliation, and the most failure.  When triumph is in his grasp, it is yanked away, cruelly. But I suppose that’s actually a fairly accurate portrayal of the reality for kids at a professional ballet school. Actually, Tara is also the victim of almost constant and often quite harsh and public degradation, and like Sammy, she manages to bob to the surface again and again; both characters are attractive because they represent the essential goodness and steadiness that are needed to make a real professional artist – it’s such a common sense view and so contrary to the romantic notion that the best artists are the most tortured and self-absorbed. Indeed, one of the most poignant scenes comes in the final episode of season two; it’s a flashback, and Tara is sitting on the stairs outside the dormitory at night, looking pensive. Sammy comes and sits beside her, asking “What’s wrong? Did anything happen?” She smiles a little sadly, shrugs, and says, “Oh just the usual daily humiliations. I’ll be alright.” Then they just sit there companionably. The thing is that it’s not clear whether this took place early in their friendship or later, whether it relates to any specific episode that has been seen by the viewer, or whether it’s just a random night from their two years at the school; it’s emblematic of their relationship as a whole – they are kindred spirits, united by their outsider status, their love of their art, and their underlying strength of character. I did some weeping about that scene too.

So, if you have approximately fifty hours to spare before Downton Abbey season 3 begins, and you’re a sucker for ballet-themed entertainment, I recommend this sweet, but sometimes tough, teen drama. It is equal parts silly, sober, and effervescent. There’s a lot of fun dance (not all or even most of it classical ballet), some very pithy moments that capture the competitive and rigorous nature of ballet training, and some quite good acting and dancing.

I know I’ll be eagerly awaiting the stateside release of Season 3, now in the making.

First position

I live in Utah, so many of my neighbors and some of my friends own and use guns; mostly, they hunt, though some are into shooting at targets, including stop signs and rusted out cars left in a gully up in the mountains. Having grown up in liberal old Seattle with pacifist parents (despite that my dad was an ex-Naval officer), this all seemed weird to me at first, and deeply, deeply wrong. But mostly, in the eight years I have lived here, I have managed not to let it intrude on my day-to-day life; in other words, I have been a quietist about guns.

After last week, of course, it is much harder.

What does this all have to do with ballet? Well. First, there is this post: http://thehealthydancer.blogspot.com/2012/12/using-dance-to-heal.html, by a ballet teacher who helped a school of elementary kids cope with the stress and grief of the massacre through dance. I thought of the adage I once heard, "It is impossible to be sad when you are dancing." At the time I first heard this, I wondered if this was really true: so much dance (especially ballet) is about really, really, intense sorrow -- Giselle, Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet... but on the other hand, what is being danced and the emotional sensation of dancing can be quite far apart. I have heard other dancers describe an overwhelming sense of exhilaration when performing a grief-stricken scene (La Bayadere, Nikiya's dance with the flowers at the wedding), and certainly, even when the music is really schmalzy and the choreography super somber, I am less sad, than immersed in the physical experience of telling that sadness... and that experience itself is not sad, but intense and in a strange, somber way, joyous. In fact, the first time last week that I wasn't dwelling on last Friday's events was in ballet class on Tuesday night. Even at yoga on Saturday morning, I could not stop thinking about those children, their parents, and the horror of it all.

Also, dance has, as an art form, often been used to speak against violence; Kurt Jooss' The Green Table, for example, is an overtly anti-war ballet, and Anthony Tudor's heartbreaking Dark Elegies, set to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder,("Songs on the Death of Children") is even more to the point here. These lines, from Friedrich Ruckert's lyrics strike me as especially poignant, in light of the recent killings:
Oft denk’ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen!
Bald warden sie wieder nach Hause gelangen!
Der Tag ist schön! O sei nicht bang!
Sie machen nur einen weiten Gang. 
(I often think: they have just gone out!
Soon they will be coming home again!
It’s a lovely day! O don’t be afraid!
They are just taking a long walk.)

Dance, too, is a fundamentally nonviolent art form. Not to say it cannot portray violence; it is quite good at that. But because it is rooted in the human body, and the interaction of that body with space, time, and other human bodies, it constantly brings us back to and reminds us of our physical frailty, our earthbound existence, our interdependence. That a dancer's body can seem, for a moment, to defy gravity or the laws of anatomy is only a way of underlining the fragility of these vessels in which we live, their permeability, mutability, mortality. As such, dance is not an art form that can revel in the fragmentation of the body; even Jerome Robbin's The Cage is really mostly about the women's bodies, and not about the bodies of the men they are devouring. And the violence is implicit, not Hollywood gross-out spectacle. In fact, that makes it the more sinister, the more alarming; maybe too the contrast between those voracious female bodies and their quite evident human physicality. They are muscle and bone, and just a liable to dissolution as any other body.  Also, when it's well danced, the ballet is really a cautionary tale about human cruelty and necessity of compassion, not a horror movie about females who kill and eat their mates.

What about war dances, then? Since antiquity, and across cultures, people have used dance as a ritualized expression of aggression -- in Utah last year some police officers of small cultural literacy actually arrested some teenaged football players for performing a Haka dance before a match, thinking the kids were actually physically threatening one another (having seen a Haka dance, I can sort of understand their perception). However, I think exactly the point of hyper-aggressive dance displays is that they contain and structure the violence, the rage, and the hatred that they express; a "dance war" or a "battle of the dance teams" may involve a huge amount of adrenaline, very real and very passionate feelings of enmity, and many other elements analogous to those of war or violent brawling, but where actual war leads to death, dismemberment, and destruction, a dance war is creative, often resolving or at least alleviating the tensions and conflicts that fed it in the first place. Of course, it doesn't always work... sometimes the dance war devolves into real conflict, but I think that's probably the exception.

I am not so naive as to think that somehow just by dancing we can change the world and make it a less violent place; that a plie can be translated into sane gun-control policies that would let my friends and neighbors who use their firearms responsibly retain them for the purpose of hunting or target shooting or even, yes, self-defense (though I think that I've heard statistically one is more likely to be hurt or killed by one's own handgun than to defend oneself successfully with it against a genuine attacker); that a grand-battement could kick policy makers in the ass and get some decent mental-health care options going in this country; that a tour-jete could make the violent and the homicidal lay down their guns and spare the lives of innocent children (the majority of children who die of gun-related injuries, by the way, are not suburban schoolkids, but black children in our inner cities -- the outrage just isn't there for them, because they tend to be killed one by one, not twenty at a go... and that's a generous view of why nobody's screaming mad about it).

Yet I hope that by teaching, learning, and sharing all the participatory arts: dance, music-making, mural-painting, and so forth, we can slowly, slowly turn the face of culture in which we live from the blank stare of the film-goer or video-game-player mesmerized by fantasy mass-murder and destruction, toward a more thoughtful, reflective, engaged, and life-celebrating view. Who knows, if Adam Lanza had been enrolled in a dance program, maybe this would have prevented the tragedy. But that would presuppose a system in which we care for the fragile and the wounded and the broken among us as diligently as we care for our own immediate interests.

In conclusion: though I may still be reticent to express the full strength of my antipathy towards gun culture, I have been forcing myself to be clear, when I talk with my friends and neighbors here, that I feel unequivocally that it is time for more stringent gun-control measures. I have also been taking some notes on an idea I have for working with a colleague who is a dance and movement professor, and collaborating with our local ArtsBridge program, to start a dance-in-the-schools initiative with a focus on non-violent conflict resolution.

Dancing with my Daughter

Tonight I took my daughter to ballet. She has been taking lessons for about two and a half years at our local civic ballet. Before that, she did gymnastics and "baby ballet." She is eleven, about the age I was when I really caught the bug after six years of ballet, and started actually wanting to be good. Something is going on with her (other than the first onslaught of puberty); she is a tense kid, not particularly flexible, very little musical sense, but suddenly she is on fire to go on pointe. I explained to her that just because she's eleven doesn't mean she is ready. However, I also said I would work with her, as best I can, to get her ready. Thus, ballet with the grownups tonight (with the teacher's permission of course).

She stood behind me at barre, so I couldn't see what she was doing, which is probably good. I always go through a period of adjustment at the beginning of class, as if my mind needs to warm up as well as my body. I have to actually think all the the things that after fifteen minutes or so become reflexes again; core held, chin level, shoulders back and down, neck long, arms floating, feet... you get the idea. K, the teacher gave her some good corrections, I thought. She knows AW (daughter) from last year, when she had her in class, so fortunately neither felt shy of the other.

She is a gawky child, all long, long, limbs and this tiny little body, like a pretty little spider. I think there may be some grace in there -- at her end of term recital I saw it in her port-de-bras, a kind of sustain that wasn't there before. But it takes so much work to make a dancer, and the discipline and rigor of our little school is simply not that intense, so for someone who isn't a "natural" it is probably a lot harder to get there. I hope I can help her get to her goal of going on pointe, but more, I hope I can show her that it doesn't matter that much, in the end, so long as one enjoys dancing and finds some bliss in it.

Toward the end of class, K set a very simple combination, a saute arabesque/chassee on alternate sides -- pure, skipping fun. All of us were smiling as we did it, and AW got a big grin on her little face and said, "Wow, that was awesome!"

So, maybe she doesn't need me to show her anything. She already knows.