Just Danse
frederick wiseman’s new film looks into the inner workings of the paris opera ballet
PrintThere is a line at which two mirrors come together. If you stand in
front of it, your reflection almost disappears into the crack.
In “La Danse,” Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary about the Paris
Opera Ballet, mirrors play nearly as important a role as the dancers
themselves. In one scene, two dancers are filmed from the back of the
studio as they rehearse a pas de deux from choreographer Wayne
McGregor’s “Genus.” We see their backs, McGregor pacing at the front
of the studio, and their reflections in the mirror. In another scene,
a barefoot dancer with a long skirt flirting about her ankles works
through an earthy solo variation. We watch her use the mirror to hone
her technique, then gaze into the mirror as her image wanders away.
We also see a dancer practicing his adagio where two mirrors meet,
knees slowly bending, legs unfurling towards the ceiling. Only his
reflection is filmed—his image, projected onto the mirror, expands and
slims with his every movement, deleting the middle of his body.
As might be expected from someone so entranced by mirrors and images,
Wiseman’s main interest deviates from that of most dance filmmakers.
His film observes the Paris Opera Ballet as a many-sided institution,
highlighting often unseen facets of the company. There are, of course,
numerous scenes in which we see dancers, choreographers, and teachers
at work, and these are beautifully executed. Wiseman’s cameras record
them as they work through technical difficulties and take classes.
Ballet masters squabble over how a variation ought to look; a young
dancer looks doubtfully at a prop gun he must hold as a soldier in
“The Nutcracker.”
There are also long ribbons of film in which Wiseman records the
dancers dancing, both in rehearsal and in performance. He films parts
of “Paquita,” the snow scene from “The Nutrcracker,” Mats Ek’s “The
House of Bernarda Alba,” Sasha Waltz’s “Romeo and Juliet,” Pina
Bausch’s “Orpheus and Eurydice,” and Angelin Preljocaj’s “Medea.” He
is careful not to cut off far-flung limbs with his camera. As Wiseman
comments in an interview at the Film Forum, where La Danse is
currently playing, “I had seen a lot of dance films that I didn’t like
because there were a lot of close-ups of heads and arms and legs … I
wanted to show in all of the dance sequences the complete body of the
dancer because that’s what was producing the performance.”
But Wiseman is determined to make clear that he is interested in more
than the art of dance. His film also shows the hands of costume
workers sewing steadily, a woman dyeing white cloth blue, the artistic
director Brigitte Lefèvre finalizing casting, and meetings among
administrators on how best to woo donors. Men sweep the studio floors
and tidy the grand theater. A beekeeper harvests honey on the Opera’s
roof; in a stray piece of glass, we see his reflection, too. These
elements form a rhythm of their own, just as vital to the working of
the company as the strains of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” that waft
from the studio doors.
This is Wiseman’s second dance film. 1995’s “Ballet,” his first, is a
documentary that follows the American Ballet Theatre in rehearsal and
performance. Wiseman’s portrayals draw much of their individual
identities from the cities in which they were filmed.
Wiseman says that his most recent film was inspired by the years he
spent in Paris. He focuses on the Paris Opera Ballet as a uniquely
French institution, recording the ballet’s administrators as they
worry about mundane matters like strikes and the retirement age of
Opera workers. In one scene, Lefèvre and other directors speak to the
company about their attempts to change the retirement age for POB
dancers to 40.
The companies’ structures are also noticeably different. Until
recently, with the founding of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School
of Ballet, American Ballet Theatre did not have a school. The company
therefore had to import its dancers from other dance schools in the
United States and abroad. Consequently, there is less unity in style
at ABT than there is at the Paris Opera Ballet. At the POB, Lefèvre
emphasizes, the school is the heart of the company: it is here that
young children are molded into dancers.
There is also strict hierarchy at the Paris Opera Ballet that is not
as apparent in Wiseman’s film about ABT. In a discussion between a
young choreographer and Lefèvre, for example, the latter tries to
impress upon the former that company’s hierarchy must be upheld: he
cannot simply assume that principal dancers like Aurelie Dupont or
Laetitia Pujol will dance any work made for them. To give them
something less than superb, she says, would be like driving a race car
at six miles per hour.
Yet despite the differences in the companies, Wiseman’s artistic
philosophy is reflected in both of the two films. Both are stridently
unsentimental; the filmmaker retains a distance between himself and
his subject. Wiseman has no real presence in his documentaries. The
lens of his camera sometimes seems like a one-way mirror. We can see
into the inner workings of this place, but no one acknowledges
us—dancers never talk directly to the camera.
Wiseman’s is a style entirely different from that of most other dance
documentarians. In a film made in 1999, “Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris
Opera Ballet,” director Nils Tavernier talks to dancers and teachers
about everything from growing up in the ballet school to the
competition within the company to raising a family. We see blistered
toes, dancers struggling for breath in the wings, corps de ballet
members laughing and snapping photos backstage, and young dancers in
class who wonder whether they have a future in the company.
“Etoiles” does a lot of work for the viewer—and it does it well.
Tavernier’s film sequences suggest the timelessness of the company:
rich, colorful dance scenes and interviews are interspersed with still
photos, black and white, over which his camera roams. The beautifully
shot ballets mix camera angles effortlessly, and while the focus is
not always on the dancer’s whole body—something that Wiseman tries to
remedy in his documentaries—close-ups of the dancers are nevertheless
successful in their own way.
Here, discussions of love, passion and inspiration do not feel out of
place or contrived, and the dancers are remarkably eloquent and
candid: “I think I love it [ballet],” one ventures, then pauses before
adding, “I don’t know what love is.” It is beyond love, most seem to
agree, “something that devours you.” When one dancer describes
changing roles as changing skins, it is easy to believe him. The
beauty of ballet retains its mystery and the dancers their
other-worldliness, but we are also reminded that these dancers are not
merely vessels for choreography: they are people who experience love
and loneliness.
In “La Danse,” choreographer Angelin Preljocaj cites Jean Cocteau
while coaching dancer Emilie Cozette, saying, “It is up to the
audience to figure it out.” This statement could easily be applied to
Wiseman’s film, too. Often, such an approach works brilliantly. But
the director’s distance from his subject and focus on ballet as an
institution can, at times, eliminate the magic and passion for the art
seen in “Etoiles.” Wiseman’s camera travels the tunnels beneath the
theater, thunderously silent and relentlessly illumined by fluorescent
light bulbs; it pauses at stairwells and is blinded by stage lights,
ponders wound ropes and wires, climbs to the roof to peer at Parisian
cityscapes.
Yet for all this depth and scope—despite, literally, exploring the
foundations of the theater and the streets of Paris—the film sometimes
feels stagnant, lacking the layers of the opera house itself. And so
while Wiseman lets us figure out the connections between the images he
presents, the film as a whole sometimes seems to be missing something,
like the image of the dancer reflected onto a one-way mirror.
12 November 2009
vol. 7, issue 9
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