Dance Documentaries (Part I)

Only When I Dance and First Position

Ballet stories – especially the stories of young dancers – make compelling documentary material. Though all such stories are somewhat similar, they contain the fundamental elements of human drama – the optimism of youth, the passionate dedication of the hero or heroine to an ideal, the trials and obstacles that the world throws in the way of this dedication, the very real risk of failure…

I was reminded of this when I recently watched two such documentaries, Only When I Dance and First Position, both concerning young artists competing in the Youth America Grand Prix, one of the premier pre-professional concourses for aspiring professionals. This kind of thing – the international ballet competition – was not really a standard part of the serious ballet student’s experience when I was training in the seventies and eighties. The Prix de Lausanne began in 1973, but did not start functioning as a proving ground for students seeking contracts and scholarships from professional schools and companies until the 1980s, and YAGP wasn’t founded until 1999. 

As a system for showcasing the talent of the most technically and artistically accomplished aspiring professionals, it has its strengths and weaknesses. Whereas it used to be that if you did not get into a summer workshop with one of the big company schools, or couldn’t afford to attend one, your chances of ever getting a career going were slim, these competitions allow students from smaller schools a chance to be seen and to be picked up by the companies. On the other hand, because they primarily showcase individual dance skills, they don’t necessarily prepare students for the reality of ballet employment, which has as much to do with being part of a corps and teamwork as it has to do with individual ambition. Some people feel that the competitions also emphasize spectacular technical feats over sensitivity to the music, artistic interpretation, and meaning (that is, those elements that make ballet an art form, not just a sport). Having watched a fair amount of footage of these competitions I would tend to agree that they do feature a lot of stunt dancing, but at the same time the young dancers are often quite individualistic and intelligent in their performances.

But that’s sort of beside the point, which is that as a plot mechanism the idea of big contest toward which the protagonists are striving is very handy (see my earlier post on season two of Dance Academy).

First Position focuses on a diverse group of young dancers, mostly American, or US-trained, but including an 11-year old Israeli girl, a young Columbian man, and a 14-year-old Sierra Leone born war orphan adopted and raised by a Philadelphia couple who deserve an Academy Award for Most Sympathetic Parents Ever Captured on Film. In addition, an American boy, aged 11, whose father’s naval career means that he trains in Rome, a twelve year old from Palo Alto whose Australian father and Japanese mother seem not to have noticed that her 10-year-old brother really doesn’t love ballet as much as they think he does, or think he should, and a mom-and-apple-pie normal blonde high school senior from suburban Maryland round out the crew. 

What all of these kids, war orphans and pampered suburbanites alike share is an astonishing degree of stoicism and drive; none of them are divas or self-dramatizers, at least not as the director, Bess Kargman, depicts them. They all have loving, supportive families, though in some cases, as with the Columbian kid (Joan Sebastian Zamorra) they are living far from home and struggling with the loneliness and dislocation of their situation. Kargman makes the wise decision not to over-dramatize any of their stories, setting a quiet tone that invites the viewer to identify with the young dancers and their families even when their situations or their values are quite unusual or even, when you think about it, frankly twisted.

Miko Fogarty, the 12-year-old prodigy from Palo Alto is a case in point. Her mother seems at first like a stereotypical “Tiger Mom,” overly invested in her children’s success, pushing them to work even harder than their entrepreneurial father. Early on, she says, “I could watch them dance for hours and never get bored,” a statement I found both seductive and disturbing. Yay, she adores her kids! But wait… Does she not have any interests outside watching them practice ballet? Is it even ballet she loves or the idea of her kids being stars? Her somewhat combative relationship with the children’s dour dance coach suggests that she is not a hands-off dance mom. 

Later, when her son, Jules, quits dancing, she breaks down and cries, but instead of this making her seem like an even crazier, over-invested helicopter parent, it shows her humanity. She really DID love watching him dance that much that now she misses it and is pain because she will never see him in his little Siegfried costume again. Also, in the end, how much different is she, with her ambitions for her children’s success, than the Columbian mother who admits that she had dreamed of having a girl who could pursue her own unrealized love of ballet, but since she had a son, and he turned out to be talented, she is ready to sacrifice a great deal to ensure that he succeeds?

The heroism of the ballet parents and the ballet teachers is quietly present in First Position – the story of Michaela DePrince, the war-orphan, cannot fail to make you want to hunt down her adoptive parents to hug and kiss them. One of the best scenes in the whole film has Mrs. DePrince at home, working on Michaela’s dance costumes. She is dyeing “nudie” leotards and shoulder straps to match her daughter’s dark brown skin, coloring in the “flesh” colored inserts on her tutus with a marker, and talking about how other dance parents have made casually racist remarks to her, wondering whether they are trying to be hurtful or whether they are “really that crass about race.” I don’t want to spoil the film, but I will say that Michaela’s story sheds some interesting light on the persistence of racial prejudice in American ballet.

Parents and racism are themes even more assertively explored in Beadie Finzi’s 2010 documentary Only When I Dance. Following two young dancers from the Centro de Danza in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on their difficult journeys from the favelas to the 2008 YAGP, the film focuses on the extreme ingenuity and dedication required not only of the youngsters but of their families and their mentors in order to give them the opportunities they need to rise out of poverty. Irlan Santos da Silva is a heartbreakingly handsome boy of eighteen from one of the most violent neighborhoods in Rio, the only child of a dapper father and a drily humorous, hearty mother. The camera spends almost as much time acquainting us with their lives – they love to go out dancing, Papa collects tattoos, Mami opens a café/bakery to fill her time once her son has left the home – as it does lingering on Irlan, who is so beautiful in motion that it makes your heart hurt. 

His classmate at the Centro de Danza is the exquisite Isabela Coracy, described by her teacher, Mariza Estrella, as “the only black ballerina,” at the school (though I could swear I saw other children an American would describe as black in some of the group scenes). Her blackness is a serious obstacle for her, according to Mariza, who says her chances of getting a place in a professional company in Brazil are “nil.” Meanwhile, her parents’ poverty is an equally formidable barrier – despite scholarships and school support, it’s clear they simply cannot afford for her to be competing and traveling as she must do to gain international attention.

The sacrifices made by Isabela’s family, including her retired grandmother, are heart wrenching. The racial politics are also tragic and reflect Brazil’s complicated history. In the US, of course, Irlan, with his more African-looking mother and more indigenous looking father, would be considered a “person of color.” In the film, his race is never mentioned. He is a few shades lighter skinned than Isabela, whose father is a very dark-skinned, very African looking man, and whose mother is very light skinned. 

The arbitrary and yet devastating character of racial distinction is really highlighted by their different stories. And who is to say that Isabela’s frustrations at the YAGP do not also arise from the widespread perception, discussed by Michaela in First Position, that black women are not meant for classical ballet because their bodies are too muscular, their feet “not good,” and so forth. As Isabela’s father observes – black dancers are considered very good entertainers in Brazil when they perform Capoeira, but not deigned proper for ballet, which is “bourgeois and European.” He wants, with stirring desperation, for his daughter to be able to succeed as a black ballerina. The constant harping of her coach on her weight is also part of this – Isabela is slim and delicate, but slightly more curvaceous than some of the other girls, a situation that probably has less to do with body fat than genetics, and which as Misty Copeland demonstrates is no impediment to being a top ballerina.

What all of the young dancers in First Position and Only When I Dance share is that urgency special to an art form in which success and recognition must be attained early, perhaps before a person is really emotionally or psychologically ready. The competition framework in which they operate places immense pressure on them, ranging from physical stress (injuries play a recurring role in both films), to financial struggles, not to mention what must be an incredible amount of emotional turmoil. Contrary to widely-circulating myths, these kids are not, for the most part, being driven in their desire and their ambition by their parents (even Miko and Jules mother cannot and does not try to force her son to continue when he decides he does not want to). The flame is within each of them, sometimes, one senses, consuming them from inside. Whether coming from privilege or poverty, all of these dancers seem to need to dance, to suffer, and to dance some more; it’s just in them. 

And that’s how ballet is, right? It gets under your skin, possesses your limbs, your organs, your senses, elevates you above your mundane self. Even if you are a forty-something amateur, it whispers in your ear, wordlessly, urging you on.