The Spy Who Loves Me (I hope)

A recent whim led me to check out my page-view statistics for this blog and I was totally surprised to find that people whom I don’t actually know must be reading it, at least from time to time. This constitutes a big change from six months ago when I was the only one who read it, ever. How do I ascertain that some of you are strangers to me? By the simple fact that some page views come from Russia, and so far as I know, nobody I know directly lives in Russia.

The Bright Stream... one of the original "tractor ballets" now in revival.

This is all a little intimidating. Not only am I a child of the Cold War, for whom the ceaseless barrage of media-borne Russophobia of the 70s and 80s was a formative factor in my psychic development, but I am also presuming to write about ballet, which, while hardly born on Russian soil, is so clearly and definitely Russian in so many ways. Let’s add to this that my maternal grandmother’s family fled a Russian pogrom of Kiev in 1881. And what with the violent character of recent developments in the Russian ballet world (namely the acid attack on Sergei Filin of the Bolshoi), one does tend to get a little edgy.

Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, was the most terrifying bogeyman of my childhood. I know this will sound totally clichéd, but when I was young, I lived in dire fear of total nuclear war. I grew up in Seattle, and the flight paths for SeaTac airport sometimes went right over our house; at night, I would lie in bed and listen to the jets, very certain that someday soon one of them would not be a plane at all, but a big ICBM coming to kill us all in the interest of wiping out the nuclear submarine base on Puget Sound. I had seen, in Life Magazine photo books in the school library, the horrific images of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those were the visions of sugarplums that danced in my head. 

Yeehaw! Mutual Assured Destruction!

At the same time I was aware of another Russia, the Russia that produced the divinely beautiful Misha and my heroine Natalia Makarova, the Russia of The Firebird, and the Russia of The Children of Theater Street. That Russia fascinated me and seemed a dream country. Russian literature, I understood from Woody Allen, was both heavier and more easily lampooned than western European literature (oh, how I still love Love and Death, which I laughed at long before I ever picked up a novel by Tolstoy or read a short story by Chekov: "Your skin is so soft!" "Yes, and it covers my whole body."). Russian women, I knew from James Bond films, were more beautiful and sinister than American women. 

I even had real-world evidence for this last point. A girl who went to my middle school, Lara, was Russian – her family had defected, not all that long ago. It was a very romantic story, though I don’t recall the details. Lara was absolutely gorgeous, with one of those cut-yourself-on-my-cheekbones faces, thick hair the color of actual, real gold, and the most stunning blue-green eyes. She was also very physically developed and I remember all the boys panting around after her like, well, like lust-crazed thirteen year old boys.

Plus, her name was Lara.

Lara, aka Julie Christie. Not Russian.

I had one of those music-box jewelry boxes that were popular at the time; some kind of printed vinyl paper exterior, flocked pink velvet lining, and a little plastic ballerina with a tutu made of real tulle who rotated slowly while the music played. It had the theme music from Dr. Zhivago. I used to dance around in my room to it, because I thought it was actually Russian ballet music. Years later, in high school, when my Italian friend Elisa, a film buff, dragged me to a showing of Dr. Zhivago at the Neptune, I was shocked to discover that in fact Tchaikovsky had nothing to do with it. Really, there’s nothing very Russian about it all: Julie Christie, who played Lara in the film, was born in Assam, India to English tea-planters; the composer, Maurice Jarre was French; the MGM Studio Orchestra, which played the soundtrack music was not particularly Russian, though the balalaikas on the soundtrack were evidently played by musicians from the Russian Orthodox churches around L.A.

Pussy Riot in action, 2012, Red Square

To my youthful imagination, Russia was at once this menacing beast that threatened to eat us all alive, a hotbed of sinister spies, an exciting foreign place where people rolled their R’s, wore fur coats, and ate caviar on rye toast in their dachas, and the font of all that was truly inspired in classical dance.  Now having grown up and living in a world where Russia figures very differently in the geopolitical game, I have (I hope) acquired a more subtle and complex understanding of “Russia.” I’ve read more of the great Russian books (even without Woody Allen, there’s quite a lot of humor there), forced myself to sit through some of the more bloated classics of Russian cinema (is there a medal for watching all of Andre Rubelev with sporadic Italian subtitles?), followed the unraveling of what looked like an impulse toward a more open society in the early 1990s, worried about the long-term consequences of Putin’s policies in Chechnya and elsewhere, and shuddered at the excesses of the criminal aristocracy (plus ca change?) and the murderous persecution of artists and journalists. 

Still, my “Russia” is a Russia of the imagination; I’ve never been there, and I have few contacts with Russians (aside from a few friends and colleagues, who belong to that subset of Russians who are also

Features Madame Snezhnevskaya,
ballerina and royal mistress

Jews, and thus have a particular view of things that is probably not all that similar to the “ethnic” Russian view). My Russia is made up of news items, film clips, Boris Akunin thrillers, the strains of Russian music, and ballet, as filtered through non-Russian companies and performers.

I have never seen the Bolshoi or the Kirov live on stage. I’ve never seen any of the current crop of Russian born or Russian trained stars. I’ve seen Baryshnikov, yes, but dancing José Limon’s choreography, nothing Russian. I watch a lot of Russian ballet on YouTube, but really, we all know that’s not the same. So let’s call this a disclaimer; I am a serious ballet lover who lacks any stamp of Russian authenticity. 

A serf ballerina, ca. 1800

Whoever you are reading this, out there in the fatherland of ballet, I salute you and I honor the great tradition of classical dance in Russia as it is today, as it was under the Soviet Union, and back in the old days, when noblemen kept serf ballerinas in their Petersburg town-homes and pet foreign ballet masters at their beck and call. May you live long and attend many performances at the Mariinski.

Dasvidaniya!

Summer and Survival

At our little ballet school in the mountains, summer classes for teens and adults are wildly popular, despite the heat (often in the 100s during the day) and the lack of reasonable cooling in the historic building where the school has its home. This really cheers me; people love to dance, and love the rigor of classical ballet, and are willing to put up with a lot just to get some into their lives. 

This photo, which went the Facebook rounds recently, perhaps testifies to the degree to which ballet at least in  part an art of survival, and of survivors (I don't know how staged it was). That these young women and their teacher were living amid the most wretched conditions of war, poverty, homelessness, and starvation, and still driving themselves to practice and to teach is absolutely stunning to me (if indeed they were... again, we're talking USSR so propaganda is not to be ruled out). So often ballet is perceived as or presented as an effete, elite art form, too dainty for the real world, cultivating fragile personalities, and promoting a kind of frailty both physical and emotional through its aesthetics and its narratives. 

And it’s true, as I’ve complained here before, that one does occasionally wish there were not quite so many wilting damsels waiting (usually without hope) for a prince to rescue them in the classical story ballets. On the other hand, I’ve always felt that Giselle,

Giselle, Het Nationale Ballet

the original wilting damsel, gets her own back in Act II. She may be dead, but she’s tough as nails, compassionate, and more human than any of the living characters; she stands up to Mean Old Myrtha, rescues the pusillanimous Albrecht, and restores the audience’s faith in the human capacity for love. Lots of heroines who return from the grave get to act out the fantasy of “You’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” but to my mind only Giselle really gets to rise above that. Pretty good for a fairy zombie.

Ballet itself is something of a survivor. Like opera and classical music and a few other art forms that are resolutely rooted in the deep past, it seems like it keeps coming back from premature diagnoses of morbidity. There is always talk about how the audiences for these art forms are aging and a crisis is coming, but strangely, there always also seem to be new “older” people discovering and falling in love with them. Not to say there aren’t challenges, but I think one thing that is frequently overlooked in the critical press is that ballet is happening in all sorts of venues away from, say, the Koch Theater or Covent Garden; your local amateur company’s productions may not be pushing the envelope of the art form or showcasing the next Nijinsky, but they are encouraging young people and their families to care deeply about ballet, and to engage with it. The recent death and reinvention of the Omaha Ballet as Ballet Nebraska demonstrates, I think, the incredible tenacity of ballet dancers and their audiences in the face of fiscal challenges and waning governmental support for the arts. These people are heroes!

Recently, reading a book about human evolution since the emergence of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, I came across the theory, developed by some paleoanthropologists, that human speech evolved from bodily gestures (this is not a universally held view). If this were the case, then dance would be somehow more fundamentally human, or more primordially human anyway, than verbal language. And maybe that’s why ballet, despite it’s old-fashioned vocabulary and its oblique way of conveying meaning, persists. Even in a sweltering studio in the Utah summer.

Sweaty Swan

Racy Little Ballet Words

temps de cuisse: literally, "movement of the thighs" -- I think that pretty much says it all. Also one of the most flirtatious of all ballet steps, in which the back foot steps coyly over the front, touches down lightly in fifth, then springs up with its partner into an open jump, landing in fifth. It's like "I'm going  this way, nope! faked you! that way!"

Is that a glimpse of thigh?

but not with him!

entrechat: Invented especially to describe beaten jumps, a French word derived from the Italian intrecciata, which means plaited, braided or woven in its adjectival form, but which as a verb (intrecciare) can also mean "to begin a love affair"

Soubrette

soubresault: Has an Old-French tang to it -- describes a simple enough move, to spring up (sauter... in French as in in English "to jump" with someone can have sexual connotations, as in "I want to jump your bones"), combined with that cute little soubre, which is probably innocent of meaning (originally) anything except "up" but which sounds so much like soubrette, which refers to a coquette or a pert young lady, often a sort minx in a classical French play or Italian opera.

mmmm!

brisé volé: I know it means "flying broken" step, referring to the movement that combines a fouetté movement with a jeté battu and makes your brain ache just to contemplate it, but for some reason it also sounds to me like a particularly delicious, light, and buttery croissant that one has stolen from the patisserie. So much nicer to contemplate purloined pastries than to attempt the actual movement, which has more than once resulted in my landing on my butt.

A lament and a plea

In the past, I have written about ballet documentaries, a thriving genre of which there are many fine examples. But sometimes, one is in the mood for the escapism of narrative fiction. When you look for lists of top ballet films, very few of them are fiction; somehow, the two art forms seem to exercise a kind of anti-magnetism on one another.

However, I recently rewatched The Turning Point, which is absolutely the best ballet movie ever. Ordinarily, Shirley MacClaine is not one of my favorite actors, but in this film she is absolutely brilliant as DeeDee, the early-middle-aged ex-ballerina who gave up her career to raise a family in Oklahoma City with her husband, also former dancer (played innocuously by Tom Skerritt). Her wistfulness, which I usually find so annoying, is perfect; beguiled by the might-have-beens, she nonetheless manages to keep a household running and provide some reasonable parenting to her three kids. The main plotline has to do with her return to New York to supervise the apprenticeship at the (thinly disguised) NYCB of her eldest daughter, played by the ethereal (then) up-and-coming NYCB star Leslie Browne and her relationship with her former bestie, who is still a principal dancer, played by Anne Bancroft, with brittle but human grace. More than the plot, though, the setting is what makes the film – I get such a distinctive sense of a New York before Disneyfication and Giuliani made it a “safe” place for tourists, and the developing independence of Emilia (Browne) is so touchingly limned. Of course, the very best part of the whole film is the transcendent scene where Emilia and the predictably named Russian principal, Yuri (none other than a very young and very beautiful Misha), rehearse that wrenchingly erotic pas-de-deux from Romeo and Juliet which then segues into a love scene back in Yuri’s apartment. I mean, WOW, if you ever thought ballet was stiff and formal, or that it glosses over sex, um, watch this. And then add a chaser of Ingmar Bergman’s Summer Interlude, from 1951, in which Maj-Britt Nilsson plays an older ballerina reminiscing about a youthful love affair with the usual smouldering, Scandinavian angst one expects from the great I.B.

Ballet is hard (Summer Interlude)

Most ballet movies in the narrative fiction genre leave me pretty flat. Center Stage, which often gets cited as “the best ballet movie ever” by people who obviously haven’t seen The Turning Point seemed to me just a jazzed up version of something you might see on Nickelodeon; teen striving, teen angst, some catty byplay, a sympathetic gay black guy... give me Dance Academy any day for character development. In the same category of teen melodrama we might place Save the Last Dance (Julia Stiles, racial tension, ballet vs. hip-hop); and Flashdance, which is a bit grittier (just as the eighties were grittier than the nineties), but basically the same story – girl wants to dance, girl is told she can’t dance, girl dances anyway, and in the end she is a star and gets the guy. What a feeling!

Really?

 On the darker side, Black Swan, though it had its moments as a psychological thriller, was a horror show as a ballet film; talk about perpetuating the worst stereotypes about dancers and the world of dance while exploiting cheap, vulgar-Freudian thrills in order to revel in the victimization and self-destruction of yet another innocent, virginal young thing.  Also, there was this weird lack of actual dance. File Dancers, the 1987 film with a similar plotline (dancers' lives parallel the plot of the ballet they’re preparing, only this time it’s Giselle… starring Misha and Julie Kent, so some real dance) under the same heading of “trite and exploitative.” Oddly, it’s by the same director as The Turning Point, but the film poster pretty much captures the cheese factor: Why does Baryshnikov look like an aged Luke Skywalker here? Why? 

Basically, both these films are remakes of The Red Shoes, in which life imitates art and the ballerina does some kind of fatal (swan) dive at the end, ala Anna Karenina.  As much as I despise the boringness and antifeminism of this plot, at least The Red Shoes was great, even innovative filmmaking in its time; the color (which has been restored) is lush, and the acting is hammy (it’s 1948 for heaven’s sake) but also pretty lush. Moira Shearer is really lush (that red hair!). And lushest of all are the extended scenes of original choreography for the ballet within the film; who can resist all that mid-century modern goofiness? Plus, the people who made the film were by and large pretty well-versed in the ballet of the time… notice Leonide Massine there in the cast.

Vavoom!

Cinema verite.

Robert Altman’s The Company made a strong effort to portray the real psychological drama that goes on offstage, and it also had more dancing of better quality than any of the “demise of the dancer” psychodramas.  I love Altman – his McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an all-time favorite of mine and also goes a long way to explain Warren Beatty’s status as a sex-symbol in the 1970s. The Company was made as a close collaboration between the Joffrey and Mr. Altman, and has a documentary feel to it. Even so, in its fidelity to life it is actually a bit messy and dull, despite a carefully understated performance by Neve Campbell as the heroine, a young ballerina on the cusp of big success, pondering what this means for her life. Similarly true-to-life in its content but less artistically sophisticated is Mao’s Last Dancer, a bio-pic about Li Cunxin, the Chinese-born and –trained principal for the Houston Ballet and then Australian Ballet. It has some good dance footage, but by and large the acting is a bit uninspired. 

Then there is White Nights, which I haven’t seen in years, so I cannot really critique it except to say that the dance scenes are of course so fun to watch on YouTube (not that that’s a regular, late night occurrence with me). Really, both Gregory Hines and “I am in every movie made about classical ballet between 1970 and 1990” Baryshnikov are not at the top of their games anymore at that point, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s sort of like saying that by 1985 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was no longer at peak performance… true, but he was also MVP of the NBA finals that year, which the Lakers won. Now I’m really showing my age. Ouch. Anyway I sort of recall that the dynamic between Hines and Baryshnikov essentially playing themselves was way more interesting than anything else that happens in what is essentially a late-Cold-War stock narrative with a little racial tension, a dash of Helen Mirren, a jigger of Isabella Rossellini, and a top-forty hit by Lionel Richie just to liven things up a bit (say you, say me, say it together… that’s the way it should be). Without spoiling the film for those of you who haven’t seen it, let’s just say that it ends with everything “the way it should be” from a 1985 Hollywood perspective. And what perspective is that, you might ask? Well, among the top grossing films that year: Rambo First Blood Part II, Back to the Future, Rocky IV, A View To a Kill, Pale Rider. U.S.A! U.S.A!

He can jump.

So can he.

One film that is not about ballet but that has a ballerina as one of its main characters is the not-so-spectacular sci-fi thriller, Adjustment Bureau (2011), in which Emily Blunt plays a member of the Cedar Lake Ballet involved romantically with a politician played by Matt Damon. In that film, the fact that she’s a dancer is treated as pretty much equivalent to the fact that he is a politician – both have demanding careers that involve certain sacrifices on the personal front, and that require seriousness and a fairly exclusive focus. I think more films in which ballet dancers are portrayed not as swan princesses, cuckoos, or fainting maidens, but as serious artists who are also real people might be nice.

Speaking of princesses, one might expect there to be lots of ballet movies for the younger set, but there really aren’t. The horridly adorable Emma Watson aka Hermione Granger starred in an adaptation of Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (written in 1936); the novel, for children, is of that dotty but delightful and sneakily serious strain of British children’s literature. But it’s not really about ballet – it’s about children in the theater business in 1930s London. Meanwhile, Angelina Ballerina is a dancing mouse who made the grand jeté from books to animated films, and when my daughter was much younger I am pretty sure we had a movie starring none other than Barbie that purported to be a version of Swan Lake. Maybe there are others that I just cannot remember or haven’t seen? Anyway, slim pickins.

Anna Pavlova, 1912

It seems strange to me that the vast junior fiction universe of ballet stories have not been translated onto the screen. A quick check of GoodReads reveals an almost limitless virtual bookshelf of ballet-themed books for young and old. Eva Ibbotson’s critically-applauded YA novel set in 1912, A Company of Swans, about the rebellious daughter of a Cambridge classics professor who joins a touring Russian ballet company that takes her to Manaus, where naturally she falls in love and all sorts of drama ensues, now that would make a good BBC historical drama. I’ve heard Julian Fellowes is leaving the helm of Downton Abbey, so why not take this one on? 

Sadly, I come to the conclusion that narrative fiction films about ballet generally tend to disappoint. They get too maudlin about the psychology of the artists, or they take too much pleasure in the spectacle of the ballerina’s disintegration, or they merely drape ballet over a plot that could just as easily serve tennis or motorsport. Often, they don’t bother to show much real ballet. Of course, there are technical reasons for this; ballet is difficult to film well: ballet dancers are not Hollywood stars (generally) who can draw audiences to the theater to see a film: you can’t fake it when it comes to portraying a ballerina (sorry, Natalie Portman, you are luminious, but not a ballerina): ballet films are not going to appeal to the biggest money-making audience sector, which is male and aged 14-25 or something about like that. Also, it’s hard to imagine how you could turn a ballet film into a violent digital game.

But who would play Dame M?

Still, I just want to throw this one out there. I would like to beg Gillian Armstrong (the Australian auteur responsible for such films as Oscar and Lucinda and Mrs. Soffel, both must-sees) to pick up Colum McCann’s Dancer (see link on right) and cast Daniil Simkin in the Nureyev role. Now, that would be a ballet movie worth its salt (and salty it would be).