Christmas at Blackthorn Castle

Crown rack of spring lamb with rosemary and oregano 

The photo: A crown rack of lamb that will melt in your mouth! It’s something that Mrs. Bridges has made the castle’s kitchen famous for.

Christmas at the castle: Christmas day dawned cold with temps in the high 30s (F) with heavy rain almost all day. Fortunately none of us had to go outside unless we wanted to. We have a lovely fifteen foot spruce as a Christmas tree decorated with ornaments handed down from earlier holders of the title augmented down through the years. The lights are new, but the rest is very traditional. Presents were exchanged before breakfast. Though there are no children present Bea at eighteen the youngest girl present seemed almost as excited as I remember being when I was six, the Christmas before my mother died. This year I got lingerie (The giver looks forward to watching me take it off or ripping it off me himself.), perfume and gift certificates to Freed and Gaynor Minden as well as a lovely amethyst (my birthstone) necklace. Marvin gave me a special gift I had been looking for seemingly for ages, but hadn’t been able to find. I’m going to write about that in a separate post.

For the most part I gave practical token but useful fun gifts; razors (beard burn on breasts can be very annoying), condoms and Viagra for the men and Caya diaphragms, spermicide, EllaOne, remote controlled vibis (by Lelo) to be worn in the vagina and toe pads for the women. Caya should be appreciated by men too because the matte textured dome stimulates the glans remarkably and the removal dome can be used by a lover to stimulate the wearer’s G-spot. Just saying…   Later, in a private moment I gave my wards small designer leather bags fitted out and fully equipped as slit-kits.

Menstrual cycle status: Later Christmas morning my wards, their French ballet boyfriends and I took our obligatory ballet and pointe classes to stay flexible for the anticipated ballet and dive-sex. All my wards have frameless, stringless copper bead GyneFix IUDs implanted so they cycle naturally. When I lived in Las Vegas and my wards lived with me they were in menstrual synchrony with me because we sweated so much together that their bodies synched to my pheromones. Now that we live apart Bea and Willow cycle on their own while the Dryads, Bryony and Claire are beginning to sync with my 28 day cycle. Christmas day I was CD14 and ovulated while the Dryads were about CD9 and fertile. Bea and Willow were CD 20 something and luteal.

A first dip in The Wells: The women all followed me down to the shallowest (64 ft.) of the wells. We inserted our latex flat spring diaphragms, used as flood insurance, in case men joined us and wanted dive-sex. But none did as they were glued to the telly binge watching one sport program after another. I had Carla hang a net at 30 feet in the shallow pool as a precaution so if there was an uncontrolled descent the diver wouldn’t fall to the bottom.  

We wore thong bikinis, flippers and swim caps to keep the chemicals out of our hair. Carla checked the fit of our OTS Guardian FFMs and buoyancy compensators with integral weight pockets. She has checked that all the masks were in good repair before we got to the equipment room Willow, Bea and my Guardians have gotten a lot of use but Bryony and Claire just got theirs so they are still getting used to wearing them. One of the nice things is that we can all talk to one another on the comm. units while underwater and we can all hear each other scream, moan, whimper and gasp in orgasm.

Pool temperatures: For Olympic swimming, the Red Cross and FINA (The international governing body of swimming, diving, water polo, synchronized swimming and open water diving), have set the water temperature for competitive swimming between 77° to 82° F (25°-28°C), and 81°F (27°C) for synchronized swimming. Warmer water is less dense and therefore less friction as a swimmers body moves through it. Standard water temperatures ensure that all performances are on a level state of conditions. I have my pools temperatures set at 79° (F) and that is very comfortable. 

Christmas dinner: Dinner on Christmas day for my wards, their boyfriends, Carla my 29 y/o Divemaster and her diver boyfriend, Chris my male Gyn and a ballerina girlfriend and Marvin and I went extremely well. The menu was a typical Christmas feast with turkey and crown rack of spring lamb (for which the castle kitchen is famous) stuffing, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, candid yams, mince pie and ice cream, coffee and hot or ice tea. And Christmas Crackers in which were small favors for each guest.

Sloe Brandy: After dinner the Barony’s famous (or perhaps a better term is infamous) Sloe brandy was served. It is distilled, aged and bottled at the castle from the fruit of the ubiquitous blackthorn bushes used to hedge fields and roads on the Barony. The fruit, called a "sloe", is a drupe 10–12 millimeters (0.39–0.47 in) in diameter, black with a purple-blue waxy bloom, ripening in autumn, and harvested—traditionally, at least in the UK, in October or November after the first frosts.

Charades: After dinner had settled we played a game of charades using the huge wardrobe of costumes and props that had been accumulated by Edith my predecessor. The subject for the evening was film stars from the 50s to present. The Brits seem to love dressing up especially the men who love mincing about in high heels and womens clothes. I think that must be from the sexually repressive upbringing of all-male schools, corporal punishment and cold showers that warp their sexuality. Fortunately some of them make lovely women (until you get their clothes off) so they can be great fun to play charades with!

I thought standouts in men’s roles were: Marvin who did a marvelous impression of Cary Grant “Judy, Judy, Judy”, and Chris who made an amazing Clark Gable, “Frankly Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” Go figure!

Among characters from dance films I portrayed during the evening - with the help of Emily, my dresser, who got me in and out of costume and makeup quickly with her skill as a studio costumer and makeup expert - I became: ‘Olympia’ the Moira Shearer role as a mechanical doll that comes to life in The Tales of Hoffmann (1951); the Cyd Charisse role of ‘The Widow’ dressed in black tights, black pointes, black elbow length gloves and a black bustier with circular white breast accent in  the film Black Tights (1961); and The Natalie Portman role as ‘Nina Sayers’ costumed as the Swan Queen in Black Swan (2010). What fun!

 

 

 

Ballet Beautiful goes mainstream

Mary Helen Bowers Owner of Ballet Beautiful

The New York Times
May 11, 2011
By KAYLEEN SCHAEFER

Lining Up to the Barre

EVEN if you never intend to dance onstage at Lincoln Center, like Natalie Portman’s character in “Black Swan,” you probably want to look as if you do (minus, of course, her stab wound).

Women have long coveted sinewy arms, high and tight derrières, lean legs and a regal posture. Now, in search of this shape, many of them are ditching yoga and Pilates and lining up at the ballet barre. There are at least 10 ballet-based workout studios in New York City and countless others across the country, like Pure Barre or the Bar Method. Even chain gyms like Equinox have added barre-centered classes to their lineup. There’s no sign of the curtain falling anytime soon. Even FlyWheel, the popular spinning classes, added FlyBarre in December.

“Barre methods were popular before ‘Black Swan,’ ” said Mahri Relin, the head instructor at FlyBarre. “But then they were touted as something that made you look like a dancer, and that’s made them even more popular.”

At the front of the corps is Mary Helen Bowers, who trained Ms. Portman for the movie. A former professional ballerina turned fitness instructor, Ms. Bowers taught private clients her Ballet Beautiful workout method for two years before Ms. Portman found her. Then, for about a year and half, she accompanied the actress to various film sets as she prepared for “Black Swan.” (Of being in Northern Ireland while Ms. Portman was filming “Your Highness,” Ms. Bowers said, “Danny McBride has beautiful feet.”)

This month, she is opening her own studio in SoHo to take the Ballet Beautiful method to the masses — and supermodels, apparently. Last week, Helena Christensen sauntered into the whitewashed space for a private lesson. “What I’m doing is ballet-specific in terms of the body type,” Ms. Bowers said. “The program is made to give everyone access to that ballerina body.” For example, to replicate a dancer’s leg, she has clients strengthen their inner thighs, calves, and tops and insides of knees, but skip quads. “You can’t target your quad and expect it to be long and lean,” she said.

During most group barre classes, which cost $30 to $40 each, women focus on four body parts — arms, abdomen, gluteal muscles and thighs — with highly targeted, small movements designed to tone muscles without adding mass. “Go down an inch, up an inch” is an often heard command.

The basic technique isn’t new. It was devised by the German dancer Lotte Berk, who opened her Upper East Side studio in the 1970s (it closed in 2005), and many of the current barre methods are inspired by her. Some, like Core Fusion and the Bar Method, are taught by her former instructors.

Unlike your average ballet class, these aren’t quiet sessions filled with steely competitors. The atmosphere feels more like girlfriends gathering for long-overdue drinks. Most of the instructors do have professional dance backgrounds and use words like “passé” or “relevé,” but they also tend to be unintimidating and relatable — more sorority sister than prima ballerina. On a recent morning, Kate Albarelli, a former ballerina, led the 15 or so women in her Figure 4 class at Pure Yoga on the Upper West Side through a series of leg lifts as they held onto the barre. “Everything is engaged,” Ms. Albarelli said, before joking: “Except me. Yet.”

Jenn Falik, 32, a television style and beauty expert, who regularly goes to Core Fusion, a barre class in the Exhale Spa in Gramercy Park that’s known for being as calming as it is challenging, said that it’s sometimes like a social outing for her. “If I go at a popular time,” she said, “I know everyone.” (She noted, “I also love that you don’t get too sweaty so you don’t have to re-blow out your hair after a hard class. And I think secretly whether they admit it or not many devotees would agree.”)

Which doesn’t mean barre classes aren’t as hard. Most of the moves, like squats in a grand plié position with raised heels, are so intense that they will make your muscles shake and burn within minutes. “Some of these exercises are lethal,” said Fred DeVito, a founder of Core Fusion.

Even professional ballet dancers find them difficult. “It was so hard for me,” Ms. Albarelli said of her class at Physique 57, a barre studio known for its fast-paced choreography. “I was like, ‘What the heck did I just do?’ ”

Alicia Weihl, a former professional ballerina who is now a director of training at Physique 57, was also surprised by how hard she found her first class. “I thought I was so strong because I could dance on my toes for 8 or 10 hours, no problem,” she said. “I was shaking during the thigh workout. I could barely walk out of there.”

Mr. DeVito and his co-founder, Elisabeth Halfpapp, were the first instructors to break away from Lotte Berk — in 2002 after 22 years as instructors there — to start their own studio. “We feel like the mother and father of these classes,” he said. “I can go through the list, and everyone has lineage to the days back at 67th and Madison in that town house with Liz and me running the program.”

Today, the two aren’t bothered by all the imitators — or seeing socks branded with the names of other studios in their own studio (socks are worn to prevent slipping and to imitate a ballet slipper). “I look at it like yoga,” Mr. DeVito said. “The more styles of yoga, the bigger the program becomes, and the word just spreads a little more.”

Brooke Scher, a publicist at Alison Brod, appreciates the variety. She goes to both Physique 57 and Core Fusion. “I like to mix it up,” she said. “Even though they’re very similar, it’s a nice change of pace to do both.” She said the barre workouts, which she does four times a week, had radically revised her body. “My arms are a thousand times toner,” she said. “My core strength went from nothing to something,” she added.

“Every single inch of me has changed.” She paused. “Except I’m still not particularly graceful.”

Personal Comment: I'm glad to see her going mainstream for the non-dancers among us on the East Coast.

Sarah Lane speaks out

Sarah Lane ABT Soloist

Sarah Lane speaks out: For those who missed the ten minute segment on 20/20 last night (Friday April 15, 2011) I thought it was an opportunity to hear Ms Lane and see her body language and hear the inflection of her words. I learned she has a small voice. Other than that there was nothing new. Her position is unchanged, that the movie studio under-represented the amount of the real dancing that she did for Natalie Portman. She actually said they lied about it.

Let’s assume that she is right, and that both Aronofsky’s and Lane’s statements can be parsed so they are both correct; that while 85% of the film is Portman most of the long dance sequences and pointe shots are Lane’s which I think may well be the case. Even then I think Ms Lane totally misunderstood how Movie Studios publicity machines work and finding out has disillusioned her.

Even now Ms Lane doesn’t seem to understand, that there was a major campaign under way for an Oscar and by her giving interviews talking about her role as Portman’s dancing body double she was diverting attention to herself and away from Portman. Hollywood and celebrity PR has never been known for sticking to facts and embellishing turns of phrase in publicity campaigns are as common as dirt. The 10 y/o Margaret O'Brien was said to be a rising ballet talent in the Film ‘The Unfinished Dance’ (with Cyd Charisse) in 1947. A more recent example is the actress Summer Glau. Her IMDB entry says: “She's been a prima ballerina most of her life.” OMG! Who would have known? The person who wrote that probably has no idea what a Prima Ballerina is! But that’s the nature of Hollywood publicity.

Anyway, Ms Lane is still disappointed that no one in the film industry is giving ballet attention of the sort she thinks the art deserves. She feels that Portman was given credit for more than she did. I don’t think that is the case any more than Angelina Jolie is given credit for the work her stunt doubles do jumping off cliffs, out of windows and from moving vehicles. And Ms Lane got as much credit as any other stunt double in any other film. Having ballet classified as a ‘stunt’ in film parlance may sound demeaning, but it isn’t.

I wonder if this incident has caused enough of a controversy that contracts for stunt doubles will be revised to include a clause about self promotional interviews and articles for some time after a project has been released to the public. Will continuing this tempest it toe-shoes sell more tickets and DVDs?

Black Swan at the box-office: Total Lifetime Grosses – As of April 17, 2011: Domestic: $106,909,414 36.3% + Foreign: $187,791,265 63.7% World wide: $294,700,679

The article from Entertainment Week.com about the 20/20 interview with a video clip from the interview can be seen: here.

Natalie Portman's Dance Double Speaks Out

Wendy Perron Editor Dance Magazine

"Natalie Portman's Dance Double Speaks Out"

You've read Wendy's original blog post that sparked the media frenzy surrounding Natalie Portman's dancing in Black Swan. Now hear directly from Perron and ABT's Sarah Lane, herself, as they discuss the controversy and why the public needs to know what it really takes to become a professional ballet dancer - lifelong training, dedication, and artistry.

ABC's 20/20 airs tonight at 10 p.m. EST. Check your local listings.

Visit www.dancemagazine.com to read more about Black Swan and Sarah Lane.

Personal comment: I’m sorry this is being posted on such short notice, but I just got the email with this information. I hope Wendy and Sarah spend their time discussing the work and dedication required to become a professional ballet dancer and not about Natalie Portman.

A Tempest in toe-shoes Pt III

Darren Aronofsky and Natalie Portman

Entertainment Weekly

EW.Com March 28, 2011

'Black Swan' director Darren Aronofsky defends Natalie Portman in body-double controversy

by Adam Markovitz

Responding to claims that Black Swan star Natalie Portman didn’t do the majority of her on-screen dancing in her Oscar-winning role, director Darren Aronofsky released the following statement through studio Fox Searchlight:

“Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.

And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic. I am responding to this to put this to rest and to defend my actor. Natalie sweated long and hard to deliver a great physical and emotional performance. And I don’t want anyone to think that’s not her they are watching. It is.”

Last Friday, ballerina Sarah Lane told EW that Portman only danced 5 percent of the full-body shots in the film. She also claimed that one of the film’s producers asked her not to speak publicly about her work during Oscar season. Lane’s comments came after Black Swan choreographer (and Portman fiancé) Benjamin Millepied told the L.A. Times that Natalie did “85 percent” of the dancing in the film. Lane could not be immediately reached for comment regarding Aronofsky’s statement.

Personal comment: I think with the film editor’s counts “139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane.” that is probably the end of the discussion. Although I don’t think it necessarily addressed Sarah Lane’s contention that “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie” since there were a great many upper body and leg/feet shots that NP may have done and we don’t know what the editor included or excluded in his count of ‘dance shots’. Even so, I’m so sorry that Sarah Lane seems (to me) to be coming off in this whole thing as whiney.

Entertainment Weekly

EW.Com March 28, 2011

Mila Kunis blasts 'Black Swan' controversy: 'Natalie danced her a- - off.'

EXCLUSIVE by Adam Markovitz

Black Swan co-star Mila Kunis is speaking out in support of her friend and cast mate Natalie Portman amid accusations that the bulk of the dancing in Portman’s Oscar-winning role was actually performed by her dancing double, American Ballet Theatre soloist Sarah Lane. “Natalie danced her a– off,” says Kunis. “I think it’s unfortunate that this is coming out and taking attention away from [the praise] Natalie deserved and got.”

Kunis also says Portman has been honest about how much of the demanding footwork she was — and wasn’t — able to do. “She’ll tell you [that], no, she was not on pointe when she did a fouettés [turn]. No one’s going to deny that. But she did do every ounce of every one of her dances,” she says. “[Lane] wasn’t used for everything. It was more like a safety net. If Nat wasn’t able to do something, you’d have a safety net. The same thing that I had — I had a double as a safety net. We all did. No one ever denied it.”

Last week, Lane told EW that she performed 95 percent of Portman’s full-body dance shots. Portman has been defended vocally by fiancé and Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied and director Darren Aronofsky, who insists Portman did 80 percent of the dancing in the film.

Personal comment: I guess Mila needed to get her name into the publicity. I don’t think the comment “Natalie danced her a– off” contributed much to the discussion, but her comments did show solidarity with the official, and apparently correct position, based on the film editor’s dance shot count.

More on Ballet sex by Jack: “I understand that one's posture and muscle tension in the legs, pelvis and back change when one is wearing pointe shoes. There is a quite similar change when one is wearing very tall heels with the difference perhaps that in the latter the weight can be carried on the heel and so the leg muscles are involved differently. But I would think that if the heel height is extreme the pelvic and back involvement is quite similar. And then there is standing on ones "tippy-toes", admittedly difficult for any length of time, but a similar muscular change would take place. Obviously ballet dancers stretch and strengthen their leg muscles so that this "unusual" posture is normalized so that they can stand, dance, and move about on their toes. I am not convinced that having "sex" in any of those three - pointes, extreme heels, or tippy-toes is very different. I'd think for a male it's hardly distinguishable. Of course someone who has developed more muscle control, her legs and pelvis can provide a different experience to her partner and herself presumably, but that would be true whether she was en pointe, in killer heels, or on her tip toes and so sex with a well developed female body is better than one that's not. We get it. I'm not getting it Jill, but perhaps I need to experience a side by side test so to speak. Ha-ha-ha That would be fun! Tester is blindfold for a double blind (ha-ha-ha) study.”

My reply: You recall that ballet sex was an outgrowth of the Paris Opera ballet dancers taking their lovers en pointe to offer a similar, tightened, grip to lovers that patrons experienced when frequenting prostitutes wearing high heels in Paris brothels. These days Strippers stilettos, ballet boots and pointe shoes all readily available for purchase. So a woman has a choice as to what level of skill she is willing to train for, to acquire a tightened grip to please a lover. To a true connoisseur of the female leg and the velvet vice of a ballerina’s vagina high heels then and now with the wearer’s toes flexed are not comparable to pointe shoes, because the flexed toes break the line of the leg and suggest that the woman in heels hasn’t the skill, muscles and stamina necessary to take a lover with her strongest grip while balanced on the platforms of pointe shoes. Even a woman in 5 inch stripper’s heels – which hold the wearer on three-quarter pointe - can’t compete and is relegated to third place behind ballet boot sex.

As to whether differences in the tightness and strength of the grip en pointe is distinguishable from when she is standing flat or is on her back it almost always is, but it depends on the woman, how long she has been taking pointe and how much time she spends on her toes. There are other considerations as well such as sexual experience and OB history, but the length of time she clenches her vaginal muscles, when she rises and remains en pointe, is a major indicator of how tight she will be. In some cases, me for example, I have to consciously concentrate on relaxing my muscles so a lover can comfortably enter me. But of course I wear Ban Wa balls or a Penetrator as much as I can, sleeping with the balls inserted when I’m not with a man or if he has taken me with them inserted, so I’m always training and exercising my muscles.

A tempest in Toe-Shoes, more Black Swan Pt II

Natalie Portman and Benjamin Millepied in Black Swan

I’m indebted to ‘the Mysterious J’ for bringing the article below to my attention. And the tempest continues…

Entertainment Weekly
EW.com March 25, 2011
by Adam Markovitz

'Black Swan' double claims Natalie Portman only did '5 percent' of full-body dance shots in the movie

The ballerina who served as a dancing double for Natalie Portman’s Oscar-winning role in Black Swan tells EW she has been the victim of a “cover-up” to mislead the public about how much dancing Portman actually did in the film. “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie,” says Sarah Lane, 27, an American Ballet Theatre soloist who performed many of the film’s complicated dance sequences, allowing Portman’s face to be digitally grafted onto her body. “All the other shots are me.”

Lane’s claim follows a March 23 L.A. Times article in which Portman’s fiancé and Black Swan choreographer Benjamin Millepied said Lane’s work in the film was far less significant. “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”

Lane disagrees. “The shots that are just her face with arms, those shots are definitely Natalie,” she says. “But that doesn’t show the actual dancing.” Lane admits that she was never promised a particular title for her six weeks of work on the film, though she was disappointed to see that she is credited only as “Hand Model,” “Stunt Double,” and “Lady in the Lane” (a brief walk-on role).

Lane also says that Black Swan producer Ari Handel specifically told her not to talk about her work to the press, even though she claims there was no such stipulation in her contract. “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy or so gifted in dance and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” says Lane. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years…. Can you become a concert pianist in a year and a half, even if you’re a movie star?”

Reps for Portman, Fox Searchlight, and Handel have yet to provide comments on the matter.

Lane is barely seen in promotional materials for the movie, including a VFX reel posted by studio Fox Searchlight that appears to show all the digital alterations made to key dance sequences. An unverified version [now deleted from YouTube] of that reel, leaked to YouTube, seems to shows how digital face replacement was used to put Portman’s head on Lane’s body. (The clip was included in a blog post by Dance Magazine‘s Wendy Perron, who wrote about Lane’s story earlier this month.)

According to Lane, Portman’s dramatic transformation into a ballerina — a narrative firmly at the center of her successful Oscar campaign — wasn’t as impressive as the public was led to believe. “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,” says Lane. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancers head and really feel like a ballet dancer.”

In interviews, Portman didn’t hide the fact that she had used a body double for key sequences in the film, though Lane’s name, and the extent of her work, were played down. “I do have a double for the complicated turning stuff,” Portman told EW last November. “It was not anything I ever could have done in a year, nothing I could’ve caught up with. But I think it was just better for all of us if I did as much as possible.”

Lane insists she isn’t speaking out of jealousy over Portman’s acclaim. “[Natalie] is an amazing actress, for sure,” she says. “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”

Personal comment: Readers should note the carefully chosen quotations used:

Sarah Lane: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie all the other shots are me.”

Benjamin Millepied: “There are articles now talking about her dance double [American Ballet Theatre dancer Sarah Lane] that are making it sound like [Lane] did a lot of the work, but really, she just did the footwork, and the fouettés, and one diagonal [phrase] in the studio,” he said. “Honestly, 85 percent of that movie is Natalie.”

Sarah Lane: “I mean, from a professional dancer’s standpoint, she doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff,”

Sarah Lane: “I know that it’s not a personal thing against me. I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”

There is nothing in conflict between: “Of the full body shots, I would say 5 percent are Natalie” and “85 percent of that movie is Natalie.” And Sarah is right when she says, ‘from a professional dancer’s standpoint she doesn’t look like a professional dancer.’ Natalie doesn’t, certainly her legs, but that’s what body doubles/stunt persons are for and the film wasn’t made for the professional dance community. Sarah got as much credit as any other body/stunt double gets in a film. With this tempest I’m not so sure that ‘Any publicity is good publicity’ if the person comes off as a whiner.

As I’ve written before I think the unfortunate part of this whole thing is the naiveté of Wendy Perron the editor of Dance Magazine who added her prestige to the notion that Sarah Lane was ‘thrown under the bus’ by the studio PR machine because she was “exploited” thinking – erroneously – that body doubles get more credit in films than they do and the celebrity chasing media pounced on this as a catfight to generate magazine sales and website hits. And, it worked.

A tempest in Toe-Shoes, more Black Swan

Sarah Lane and Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman Slammed by Her Black Swan Dance Double

US Magazine
Yahoo March 25, 2011

Black Swan blackout!

“Sarah Lane, the American Ballet Theater dancer who acted as Natalie Portman's dance double in the hit film, has a gripe with the Oscar-winning star and the film's execs.

Lane alleges she was told by executives at Fox Searchlight to stop speaking publicly about her work in the movie so that Portman could take the credit for the amazing dance moves herself.

"They were trying to create this facade that she had become a ballerina in a year-and-a-half," she told Dance Magazine in December. "So I knew they didn't want to publicize anything about me."

In interviews, Portman talked frequently about how grueling it was to master ballet techniques for the intense psychological drama. Yet when she won her Academy Award for the acclaimed performance, the actress failed to acknowledge Lane during her acceptance speech. Lane was also apparently deleted from a DVD extra showing Black Swan's special effects.

Rising up in Portman's defense? Benjamin Millepied, "Black Swan’s choreographer and now Portman's fiancé (and father to the pregnant star's unborn child). Lane "just did the footwork and the fouettes and one diagonal in the studio," Millepied, 33, recently told the L.A. Times. "Honestly, 85% of that movie is Natalie."

Personal Comment: Celebrity Rags like US Magazine love controversy and stretching the facts to create something out of nothing. Unfortunately in this instance they were aided and abetted by the Editor of Dance Magazine who should have known better than to put in print [see the articles below] her fears w/o checking the facts and the normal Hollywood studio publicity pecking order before strongly suggesting that Sarah Lane, as Natalie Portman’s body double, was overlooked. When Lane said: “I knew they didn’t want to publicize anything about me” she was absolutely right. As excited as I was to have Sarah Lane dancing in the film I understand the body double isn’t the one that (most) movie goers are paying to see, it’s the star! And I’m sure Sarah recognized that!


Is There a Blackout on Black Swan’s Dancing?

Dance Magazine on-line
Posted by Wendy Perron on Thursday, Mar 03, 2011

“Do people really believe that it takes only one year to make a ballerina? We know that Natalie Portman studied ballet as a kid and had a year of intensive training for the film, but that doesn’t add up to being a ballerina. However, it seems that many people believe that Portman did her own dancing in Black Swan.

I think there has been a propaganda of omissions in the media that has reinforced that belief. Here are what I consider two glaring examples:

First, in the video of special effects that was going around the internet, a certain crucial three seconds has been deleted. When the video was first released a couple weeks ago, it showed, among its many techno-alterations (mirror double takes, gore enhancement, adding skin rash, puppet legs, etc.) a more unusual special effect: face replacement. Toward the end of the video, the Black Swan starts a manège of piqué turns from a distance. When she gets close enough to see her face, you could see a dancer’s face being swiped over by Natalie Portman’s face. If you paused the video, you could recognize the first face as Sarah Lane’s. This swiping moment was identified in the video as “face replacement.” Then, with Portman’s face, the dancer finishes her piqués, goes into fouettés, and by this time has big black wings that she swoops up and back in her final, triumphant arch back.

The day before the Oscars, I looked at this video on several sites so that I could show this moment of face replacement to my son, who’s a film guy. And it wasn’t there. It had been deleted. When I tweeted about this, someone tweeted back that it had only been there for one day before it was pulled.

(Click here to see the Black Swan special effects video minus face replacement.)

Second, at the Oscars, Natalie Portman thanked about 20 people (including Mary Helen Bowers, the former NYCB dancer who trained her for that year). But Sarah Lane’s name was not among them. I wonder, was this Portman’s forgetfulness in the heat of the moment? Or was this omission, and the deletion from the video, planned by the studio's publicity machine?

Sarah Lane is not just a dancer who happened to be the right size. She’s a real ballerina at ABT who was our cover story in June, 2007. Last December, we interviewed her about her hard work for Black Swan and she told us about face replacement. But was she prepared for credit replacement?

We hear rumors that people are calling the box office of ballet companies asking if they can see Natalie Portman in Swan Lake. I don’t know if this is true, if audiences are really that clueless about ballet training. I wish they were asking if Sarah Lane will dance Odette/Odile (and I hope she does soon).

It seems to be far more accepted that your run-of the-mill movie star needs help singing rather than dancing. When Natalie Wood starred in West Side Story in 1961, I think it was common knowledge that her singing was done by soprano Marni Nixon. But maybe I’m wrong. Did the studio try to hide this fact? Does anyone know?”

Personal Comment: the Special effects video in the above post is fascinating!

Putting the Black Swan Blackout in Context

Dance Magazine on line
Posted by Wendy Perron on Friday, Mar 11, 2011

“Sarah Lane, whose heavenly dancing helped make Natalie Portman believable as the ballerina Nina Sayers—thanks to face replacement—was not acknowledged by Portman at the Oscars. Not only that, but Lane was suddenly deleted from a video showing Black Swan’s special effects that was circulating on the web. In my blog last week I called it a blackout.

Sarah Lane calls it a more polite word: a façade. I asked her if she was expecting to be thanked when she heard Portman reel off 10 or 20 other names during her acceptance speech. Lane said no, because a Fox Searchlight producer had already called to ask her to stop giving interviews until after the Oscars. “They were trying to create this façade that she had become a ballerina in a year and a half," she said. "So I knew they didn’t want to publicize anything about me.”

As she said in Dance Magazine's December interview, she felt good about her work—though it was exhausting and frustrating—on the set. “It was a great experience to see the whole process of making a movie,” she told me. But she didn’t realize until just before the Oscars just how exploited she was. All the pirouettes, the full-body shots, and just-the-legs shots were her. (She also said that fellow ABT soloist Maria Riccetto doubled for Mila Kunis in one long shot.) The publicity campaign from the studio, however, spread the word that Portman did 90 percent of her own dancing.

Is it unusual for real dancers to get shoved under the rug in Hollywood? From the responses I got to my previous blog, no. John Rockwell reminded me that Savion Glover, whose tap dancing and choreography were the heart of the animated movie Happy Feet in 2006, was barely acknowledged. In a very funny take on this (“Penguin, Shmenguin! Those Are Savion Glover's Happy Feet!”), Rockwell tells us that Happy Feet director/producer George Miller claimed the movie would have been impossible without Savion—and yet the tapper's name appears way down in the credits.

Likewise, on IMDB, Sarah Lane’s name appears way down the line for Black Swan, not as a double but as “Lady in the Lane,” which she explained to me was a split-second scene where she appears as an incidental, non-dancing figure. Obviously she was not as crucial to the film as Glover to Happy Feet; Darren Aronofsky could have hired a lesser ballerina. But the idea is the same. Get a real virtuoso to make it believable, but pour all your publicity into the studio’s star—even if they are only audible and not visible as in Happy Feet.

It seems that when a movie star needs a singer to double for her voice, that’s common knowledge. No one is surprised to learn that Audrey Hepburn and Natalie Wood didn’t do their own singing when a trained voice was required. But people seem to believe that Natalie Portman did her own dancing. Of course to most people, Portman was entirely believable. (I myself found her upper body fairly convincing.) But for dancers, the idea that you can turn someone into a ballerina in one year is ludicrous.

Sarah says she was more offended by that myth than any slight to her as a dancer who worked “painstaking” hours on the set. She says she's talked to her colleagues about “how unfortunate it is that, as professional dancers, we work so hard, but people can actually believe that it’s easy enough to do it in a year. That’s the thing that bothered me the most.”

(Addendum: A reader foraged on the web and found the one instance of the original special effects video that still shows face replacement. Click here. [Removed from YouTube due to copyright claim by Fox Searchlight.] to see Sarah Lane's face, during piqué turns, swiped over by Portman’s.)

(One fun tidbit I learned from reader Jeff Nelson: Olivia Newton-John had a dance double for a scene in the “Hand Jive” number of the movie Grease. For an alley-oop, a member of the ensemble, Antonia Franceschi, was her dance double. Franceschi went on to dance in Fame and join New York City Ballet.)”

Personal comment: “But she didn’t realize until just before the Oscars just how exploited she was. All the pirouettes, the full-body shots, and just-the-legs shots were her.”

Well, yes, that’s what the job of a body double is! I’m glad to see the word ‘exploited’ wasn’t in quotes in Perron’s article. As far as I’m concerned Perron has lost her credibility on this subject because in this article Perron is trying to recover from an editorial error and refocus attention elsewhere by claiming Lane was exploited. I’m sorry Sarah has been put in this position.

Here is Sarah Lane’s interview that appeared in Dance Magazine on-line for December 2010

Quick Q&A: Sarah Lane
By Kina Poon

An eerie drama set in the world of a fictional New York City ballet company, the film Black Swan opens in select theaters on December 1. Actress Natalie Portman portrays Nina, a principal who must find her darker, Odile side—with harrowing consequences. Last winter, the captivating Sarah Lane was tapped to be Portman’s dance double. An American Ballet Theatre soloist since 2007 (when she also graced DM’s cover), Lane spoke with assistant editor Kina Poon about what it was like to work with Portman and which is harder: dancing for film or in performance.

Were you nervous to work with Natalie and director Darren Aronofsky? I wasn’t nervous. Everyone was great—the crew, the corps girls, Natalie, Mila Kunis, Winona Ryder, and Vince Cassel as well. I really enjoyed working with the director. He was demanding but encouraging. It was sort of like working with a choreographer—he knew what he wanted, but he would get inspired by something in the moment or change something that didn’t work.

Anything technically challenging? I had to do the black swan coda—16 piqué turns following tracking marks on the floor pulling into 16 fouettés onstage at Purchase College. The lighting setup was really bright. And the floor was so soft, it was like trying to turn on a yoga mat. I couldn’t push out of the floor. And I had these little foam balls stuck to my skin, my arms, and my face for face replacement. I probably did it 40 times. I was almost crying I was so frustrated.

What about faking special effects? There’s a part where the director wanted to do a close-up of my feet with blood dropping onto the floor and hitting my shoes and my tights. So they gave me this dropper filled with fake blood and I had to slowly squeeze it onto the floor as I’m doing the choreography. To say the least, it was a little hard to coordinate. And I needed like a million pairs of pointe shoes because I had to change my shoes and tights after every shot. It was pretty funny!

What did you find surprising about the shoot? Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, and Victor Barbee, the company’s artistic associate, told me that it would take a long time, but I was still surprised by how agonizingly long the days were. There’s a lot of waiting around and not knowing what or when the next shot is going to be. And then once you get to your shot, they decide in a split second, and you may not be warm. It was a lot of hours, a lot of patience, a lot of waiting to get the conditions ideal for the look of the shot.

That must be difficult, because I know that you’re a very thoughtful dancer who likes to be prepared. Sometimes I would be doing shots at 4:00 in the morning. I can’t imagine doing a whole movie. At least as ballet dancers, we can appreciate scheduled rehearsals and a scheduled performance time. You can’t be prepared for a movie.

What did you do to try? I had to find time for myself when I first got there. Even if it was 5:00 in the morning, I would give myself barre and do my Pilates exercises.

Are you excited to see yourself on film? I’m really curious to see what shots they ended up using, and the digital effects. It’s exciting for me to be in a movie that’s not the normal dance movie. It’s kind of a horror film. It’s very psychological.

Did you learn about acting from watching the director work with the actors? Watching Natalie and the other actors made me think about how different it is when you’re seeing something up close. When you’re onstage, the audience is so far away. But it did make me think about how I could use my face more. And also just being more of a real person when you’re acting onstage, rather than over dramatizing something.

What could the ballet world learn from Hollywood? I think the audience would love it if we added more special effects to our productions. My little brother, who is 18, saw the trailer for Black Swan, and he said, “I might actually want to see this movie!”

And how does it feel to be part of a performance that some critics are giving Natalie Portman rave reviews for? I’m not really looking for any sort of recognition. The process was a huge learning experience and I got everything I wanted out of it. But she deserves the recognition. She worked really hard.

Would you do it again? Only if it wouldn’t interfere with my roles at ABT. I love what I do, so it would have to be a special circumstance. But I definitely would love to play around with acting more. If I couldn’t dance, I would consider pursuing it.

Personal comment: That was a great interview and she said all the right things to support the star and the film. I’m afraid the other articles by Perron and US Magazine show the naiveté of Wendy Perron and (possibly) Sarah Lane. This tempest in toe-shoes certainly didn’t do Sarah Lane any good; I just hope it didn’t hurt her. Readers can’t see Lane’s body language, facial expression and tone of voice during the interview, but I personally think her comments were correct and misunderstood by the interviewer and editor.

I love Sarah Lane’s dancing and her, having risen through the hierarchy of a professional ballet company I can’t believe she didn’t recognize as normal the operation of a performing arts organization PR machine to make the star of a production (ballet or film) invincible, or at least walk on water. Perhaps she shouldn’t have mentioned the studio not wanting her to talk about her filming experience during the run-up to the Oscars when they were trying to add even more luster to Natalie Portman’s image, but in the role of body double I don’t think she was overlooked or exploited.

Toni Bentley reviews Black Swan

Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.”

“The movie provides the most recent -- though most egregious -- example of the “ballerinas-are-victims” stance that certain good Samaritans love to embrace,” writes Toni Bentley,

Why I posted this review: I admire Toni Bentley immensely for her knowledge of ballet and her ability to translate that knowledge into words on paper which make her books fascinating reading. So it is with sadness, but understanding, that I read her unfavorable review of the film Black Swan.

Dancers are very self-critical always seeing flaws in their own performances and trying to improve and that hyper-criticality will sometimes spill over to their non-dance lives. I have some dancer friends who are unable to relax and enjoy a dance performance from the audience. They are continually watching for missteps, errors of commission or omission by the performers, to the extent that they can’t enjoy the performance. I think for many dancers who didn’t like Black Swan, that is what has happened. In critiques you read: Portman isn’t a ballerina… No one who only trained for a year can adequately portray a body that has been trained for 15 years… There is not enough dance… Most dance scenes were shot from the waist up… Ballet isn’t all rabid ballet moms, bloody toes, eating disorders and predatory Artistic Directors. But no one denies that these things exist in ballet and many dancers and devoted ballet fans dislike having that pointed out in a popular film. And many hate the idea of using the duality of Odette / Odile in Swan Lake as the frame story on which to hang a dramatic psycho-thriller of a dancer going insane. Toni Bentley wanted an entirely different film and she didn’t get it. Even so, I think this review is worth reading. I am indebted to J for bringing this review to my attention.

THE DAILY BEAST

Butchery at the Ballet
by Toni Bentley
February 25, 2011 8:48pm

“Oscar and audiences may love Black Swan, but one former New York City Ballet dancer thinks it’s nothing more than “balletploitation.” Author Toni Bentley explains why Darren Aronofsky’s psychological thriller is insultingly off pointe.

I have tried to avoid writing about Darren Aronofsky’s pirouetting parody Black Swan, but, having been a professional ballet dancer for George Balanchine, I keep getting asked what I think of the movie. And now that it has garnered a huge audience, numerous passionate fans and five Oscar nominations, it is time to put on my toe shoes, wrap my ribbons, paint on my four-inch black eyebrows, lace-up my wet-tutu suit and take a grand jeté into Aronofsky’s swamp. I mean lake.

I first saw this film at a screening last November, before it opened to the public. I had high hopes: Aronofsky had done a great deal of homework on the “ballet world,” consulting with many dancers, myself included. Reading the script a year or so previously, I’d been baffled by its reductive simplicity. But, hey, I thought, what do I know about script writing—and Aronofsky and his people seemed like earnest folk.

The film opens with a gorgeous low-lit scene of a ballerina’s beautiful legs and feet ensconced in the shimmering satin sheaths that are the art’s greatest symbol, dancing to the great soaring strains of Tchaikovsky’s passionate score. Oh goody, I thought, I will be swept away by this: the magic, the music, the beauty, the lines, those hypnotizing arched feet that skim the stage on their toes like purring paws (the ballerina was, of course, not the film’s star, Natalie Portman, but her double, Sarah Lane, a real dancer from American Ballet Theatre.)

Unfortunately it proved a terrible tease—the only lyrical moment in a film ostensibly about a lyrical art prior to the onslaught of histrionics that ensue.

One hundred and eight minutes later, as the movie ended, the friend I took—not a dancer—turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Was that supposed to be camp?” There, on the screen, was a beautiful, bleeding-into-her-tutu Portman as the White Swan, uttering those portentous dying words: “Perfect . . . It was perfect.” As a dancer, I have never been so perfectly insulted.

I had thought when I read those words in the script, this is really stupid simple (the opposite of wicked smart, I would venture), but maybe Aronofsky has one of those things you hear film directors sometimes have: a vision. This was the vision? A dead ballerina in a bloody tutu with the caption “It was perfect”? He could not possibly be basing a film on a ballet dancer—the most fleet, complex, and powerful artist of the physical that exists—and the great 19th-century love story that is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake by reducing it to one crazy girl’s addiction to perfection. Or could he? Is this how he sees our art? Like a profession full of self-destructive addicts that need an A&E Intervention, a Dr. Phil “How’s it working for you?” talk, or an Oprah bailout? Aronofsky totally missed—or dismissed—the love story that is the raison d’être of the entire ballet and, instead, myopically latched on like a pit bull (and with the same finesse) to the White Swan/Madonna-Black Swan/whore dichotomy and then delivers his sophomoric dissertation with a sledgehammer. He does, however, clearly delineate his Cygnini discoveries: a White Swan masturbates in white grannie panties, while a Black Swan goes (black) thongless into the night. (Aronofsky clearly has a penchant for mutants: his next film is The Wolverine.)

Black Swan provides the most recent—though most egregious—example of the “ballerinas-are-victims” stance that certain good Samaritans love to embrace (“those dancers are too thin, they are just too too thin”) on occasion to aggrandize themselves, while patronizing those superb creatures whose absolute commitment to excellence they cannot understand. Ballet is the practice of physicalized morality, a poetic standard for every man and woman's ideal capacity," wrote Lincoln Kirstein, who founded the New York City Ballet with Balanchine. To imply that its proponents, dancers, are victims rather than teachers provides swift avoidance of that uncomfortable suggestion. Aronofsky has created a movie celebrating the failure of a ballerina, and by implication her entire art—disguised, insidiously, as a film about sacrifice and success.

As Black Swan so clearly demonstrates, one simply cannot “act” being a ballerina. It is a state of being, of feeling, of mind, an externalized expression of internalized discipline, faith, and good manners.

But I am too harsh. Perhaps Black Swan is simply Aronofsky’s bloody, melodramatic, nonsensical, middle-of-the-road, badly-written bid for box-office success after he tasted its heady brine with the success of the excellent The Wrestler. It could have been such rip-roaring good fun (see Jim Carrey's rendition from Saturday Night Live). And a real nice break from the dull, repetitive, hard work of a true ballerina. But then Black Swan isn’t a film about real ballerinas at all, no more than Jurassic Park is a film about real scientists (or real dinosaurs for that matter)—it merely exploits the locale, the props, and the outerwear. Balletploitation is born.

This brings us to Aronofsky’s heroine: his waify, whiny, bulimic little ballerina, Nina Sayers. Don’t you just love her? The little swan who simply couldn’t fly. And then we hear—over and over —that poor hard-working Natalie Portman had to actually lose weight and work really, really, hard—I mean really hard—for a number of months to pass, barely, as a professional dancer in the film, and only then between her neck and waist (don’t look further down: it isn’t there. Even her double—the one who actually did work really hard for several decades—is hardly on screen). A ballerina without her legs and feet is like a writer without words or a singer without a voice: not one. No wonder Portman looks so beleaguered in the film: she is perhaps the first amputee professional ballerina. But, hey, it’s Hollywood, and she has already won a Golden Globe and will likely garner an Oscar for her dorsal efforts. (Her upper-body-only performance does, however, enable her to wear the first strapless tutus in dance history.)

“The world of ballet,” Portman told French Vogue after making the film “is sick, sick, sick.” Portman, however, has bravely overcome her distaste and is marrying, and reproducing, into the profession all the same. Portman is a lovely actress of considerable accomplishment in other films, but here her one-note earnest angst, denoted by furrowed brow from start to finish, is entirely unlike any real ballerina—a woman who “must have the nobility of a five-star general,” as Agnes de Mille once said—rather than Portman’s insecure little misery. As Black Swan so clearly demonstrates, one simply cannot “act” being a ballerina. It is a state of being, of feeling, of mind, an externalized expression of internalized discipline, faith, and good manners. And of course, one needs those inconvenient legs and feet.

While the result is one almost hilariously sensationalistic movie (Aronofsky even misses being either high or low camp), I have a sneaking suspicion that the director wanted his film, at least in part, to be about the Birth of an Artist. He wants to bludgeon his tutu and wear it too. In straddling his themes—a serious film about the making of an artist, and Psycho at the ballet—he misses both, and flaps around in no swan’s lake.

This, of course, the public is lapping up, especially, I surmise, the vast audience caught in the fangs of vampire love (the Twilight books and movies, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries.) Black Swan has all the same seductive red, white and black elements of blood, innocence, and death delivered with risible solemnity and repressed sexuality. Nosferatu gets a tutu! Besides, there is nothing quite like white feathers and tulle to slowly absorb and spread the blood of a nice deep, suicide stigmata. And what did Nina stab herself with? Oh yes, a shard of her smashed dressing room mirror. I get it, I get it, the mirror murder, death of narcissism by narcissism (the buzzword for those obsessive ballerinas.)

I don’t care in the least that Aronofsky’s depiction of the ballet world and its anxious protagonists uses every blatant cliché about this rarified world, where anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation, suppressed sexuality (but lots of attempted masturbation!), jealousy, stage mothers from hell, and vulgar, violent, lascivious company directors predominate. And don’t forget the requisite bloody toe close-up. Ewww! (For the record: A bloody toe for a ballerina is like a bruise for a boxer: ho-hum.)

Aronofsky displays neither respect, nor wonder, nor fascination, nor, alas, love for ballet in his film—he sees only half-clad wacko women: all four women in his mutilating misogynistic fetish are uber-crazy chicks. Predictably, he also repeats the truly absurd notion that a young female dancer needs drugs, alcohol, a wild tattooed girlfriend, and pick-up sex to the din of deafening disco music to “loosen up,” to be sexy and alluring on stage. This is a shameless manipulation (hello Hollywood!) to give regular teenage girls a point of connection to those rarified creatures. But the fact remains that reckless, self-destructive girls are simply not the ones who succeed in ballet—they are dropouts who must go to college. Aronofsky did, however, almost win me over with the prospect of skinny crazed lesbian ballerinas in sex scenes with themselves and each other (how else to get men to a movie about ballet?) But even here, the scenes are both passionless and humorless.

Despite all this—or, more likely, because of it—Nina Sayers is the first crazy ballerina to have reached across the elitist wall of the ballet convent into the general public’s awareness, since 1986 when our own bona fide great ballerina Gelsey Kirkland wrote her bestselling memoir Dancing On My Grave (could have been Aronofsky’s title). Kirkland’s real-life drama did include starvation, vomiting, drug addiction, rivals, failed plastic surgery, multiple obsessions, and bad sex with Baryshnikov. (Kirkland was diagnosed by the world-renowned analyst Dr. Otto Kernberg as having borderline personality disorder while under his inpatient care.) Suffice it to say that no real ballerina, Kirkland included, would survive, much less succeed, with such an illness. It is important to note that Kirkland was a very great ballerina before she unraveled—not, sadly, after.

What is even sadder is that the only glimpses of the ballet world that most of the general public sees—and then believes—are these extreme aberrations. I have heard it said of Black Swan’s popularity: “But at least ballet is going on people’s radar.” Better ballet stay off their radar, if so inaccurately represented as a world of insane perfectionists, rather than what it is: a world of masterful devotees to beauty.”

Toni Bentley danced with the New York City Ballet for 10 years and is the author of five books including “Winter Season, A Dancer’s Journal” and “The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir.” She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and her story “The Bad Lion” was recently published in “Best American Essays 2010."

The 2011 Academy Awards

Natalie Portman’s Black Swan ballet trainer Mary Helen Bowers of Balletbeautiful.com

BalletBeautiful: I’m not in the habit of recommending other peoples ballet training regimens. However, Mary Helen Bowers Balletbeautiful.com: http://www.balletbeautiful.com/ did an amazing job working with Natalie Portman as her trainer for Black Swan. Women who are serious about working to develop lean long muscled bodies can’t go wrong having her as a trainer. About Mary Helen Bowers:

She began studying as a full scholarship student at the School of American Ballet in Manhattan at age 15. She was invited to join New York City Ballet at age 16. She danced for 10 years with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center and on stages all over the world. She graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. And, she created Ballet Beautiful™ method as a highly targeted and effective approach to fitness. At the heart of the Ballet Beautiful method is Mary Helen's expertise; the exquisite grace, beauty and strength that are the essence of a ballerina's form.

The 2011 Oscars: I’m having a small group of friends over this afternoon to watch the 2011 Academy Awards presentation. Usually it doesn’t make much difference to me what pictures and actors and actresses win but this year I have two dogs in the fight. My picks are:

The King’s Speech for best film

Natalie Portman for best actress in Black Swan

Colin Firth for best actor in The Kings Speech

Long time reader’s may recall that my mom was English and my biological father (Great uncle John) was Welsh, so I’m predisposed to favoring inspirational films about the Brits. I think The Kings speech has greater appeal – to the Academy – than Black swan.

I hope I’m wrong, but I think the film The Kids Are All Right with Annette Bening will probably win best picture and Bening best actress as I fear the film has more general appeal to the Academy. Sigh!

Update: I’m delighted to say that I got three for three (above) of my Oscar pics for this year!

People my age and younger don’t realize what a tremendous role-model King George VI was to the English people during WW II. The story of the Kings Speech provides some insight into what went into helping George VI be the leader he was.

I’m so pleased that Natalie Portman got the recognition she deserves for her frighteningly realistic portrayal of a ballet dancer who deteriorates mentally under the stress involved in competing with rivals for the lead in Swan Lake and in making the role of the Black swan her own.

In addition, Natalie, in her acceptance speech, thanked Mary Helen Bowers for helping her train for a year to make her into a believable ballerina.

Natalie Portman wins 2011 Golden Globes award

Natalie Portman 2011 Golden Globes winner
Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture (Drama) for her role in Black Swan

“The win by Portman for her role as a ballerina coming unhinged amid a production of "Swan Lake" sets her up for a two-woman showdown for best actress at the Feb, 27 Oscars with Annette Bening, who won for her role as a stern lesbian mom in "The Kids Are All Right," which also won for best musical or comedy film.

It's familiar territory for Bening. She won the same prize at the Globes 11 years ago for "American Beauty" and went in as the best-actress favorite at the Oscars, where she lost to Globe dramatic actress winner Hilary Swank for "Boys Don't Cry."

Portman thanked the film's choreographer, her fiancé Benjamin Millepied, with whom she's expecting a child. He also appears in the movie, and his character doesn't want to sleep with hers. "He's the best actor! It's not true, he totally wants to sleep with me," Portman said, giggling.”

Black Swan box office: domestic Total as of Jan. 16, 2011: $72,993,000 (Estimate)

Black Swan – Should young dancers see it?

Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers

The New York Times
January 7, 2011

To Some Dancers, ‘Black Swan’ Is a Cautionary Tale
By SARAH MASLIN NIR

“CARMELLA IMRIE spent six grueling hours last Wednesday mastering steps like the brisé and jeté battu for Keith Michael’s ballet “The Alice-in-Wonderland Follies.” But instead of going home to nurse her toes afterward, she and five other dancers with the New York Theater Ballet headed out to see “Black Swan.”

After sitting through the nearly two-hour-long thriller, Ms. Imrie, 27, left the AMC Loews theater in Kips Bay wanting to shake her arms, as if her skin were crawling. It wasn’t the gore of the bloodied tutus, but the psychological subtext. “It’s the destructive personality that makes it really creepy,” she said. “You don’t ever want to have that to become you.”

“Black Swan,” which stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina whose rise to the top comes at the price of her sanity, has become something of a must-see movie for young ballerinas, not just because it is the rare Hollywood film that uses ballet as its central universe. Some dancers say that the film holds up a mirror to a darker side of ballet.

The film’s director, Darren Aronofsky, might have set out to make a thriller, but for dancers, the chills come from the unsettling topics he laid bare: the blind pursuit of perfection, the anorexia and bulimia to achieve a fat-free swanlike figure, the sexual abuse of fragile ingénues.

Those tensions are embodied in Nina Sayers, a young ballerina played by Ms. Portman. The movie begins with Nina choking down an ascetic breakfast: one grapefruit. Later, she heaves her bony shoulders to retch in the ballet company’s bathroom, and refuses even a taste of a pink-frosted celebration cake her mother has bought her.

The scene may be played with melodramatic effect, but its underlying pathos is familiar to ballet dancers. Tara Hutton, 21, a senior at Butler University in Indianapolis who is studying dance, said the specter of eating disorders haunted many of her classmates. Ballet, she said, can be a “sick and twisted art form” that puts an unrealistic value on “achieving this beautiful thin body.”

At dance camps she attended growing up, drinking quarts of Crystal Light and cup after cup of coffee to tame hunger pangs was a common practice. Dancers who starve themselves also increase the likelihood of stress fractures and other injuries, she said. In one scene from the film, Nina’s toenails crack off in her toe shoes.

“You see a dancer who is injured, and you can’t help but think twice about the fact that it could” be from eating disorders, said Ms. Hutton, who is preparing to audition for ballet companies in the Midwest this spring. “You’re working every day to achieve something that is physically impossible.”

For Nina, the impossible reflects the demands of her smothering mother, a failed dancer herself who seeks vicarious fulfillment through her daughter.

Cheryl Kaeser hesitated to let her daughter Emma, 15, a ballet student in Manhattan, see the movie. “I was concerned that it may show a particularly ugly side of ballet,” she said. Only recently has she decided to take Emma to the film, after serious consideration.

The film also portrays ballet as a quixotic art form that demands nothing less than total submission to the craft. Nina pirouettes until her feet are bloodied, twirling before the barre so long into the night that the theater lights go out on her, and still she wants more. Hidden under her fashionable shrugs are angry red lines that she clawed into her skin, and her fingers are bandaged to hide the raw patches of skin she casually peels. The pressures dancers face rang true for Ellen Bar, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, who attended the film’s New York premiere with 30 dancers. “The psychological torture of being an artist” felt real, she said. “The way it shows an artist being her own worst enemy.”

Jennifer Homans, a dance critic whose new history of ballet, “Apollo’s Angels,” has drawn critical applause, said that dance tends to draw people who have a kind of discipline and dedication that can flip into obsession. “They are obsessed with trying to make their bodies into something beautiful and special and otherworldly,” Ms. Homans said. “There is an enormous psychological pressure cooker there at a very young age.”

Torture for Nina came also in the form of the sexual advances of her director, Thomas Leroy, played by Vincent Cassel. He slides a wanton hand down her leotard when teaching her a turn, and shoves his tongue into her mouth when she dares to slip into his office and ask for a better part.

The dynamic has a historical precedent: the charismatic choreographer George Balanchine had a well-known weakness for his own dancers, reported in newspapers and tabloids during his time, and in books including “All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine,” by Terry Teachout.

“Is there a problem with a sort of dominant male figure and a woman under his power? Yes, that happens,” Ms. Homans said. But the problem, she added, might be exaggerated in cases of ballet companies filled with young female dancers and directed by men. “The outside world may glom on to this more in the dance world because it’s a physical art form, so the power relationships seem physical. They exist in all worlds, but they may seem to people more intense here.”

Not everyone agrees with the gloomy picture of ballet that Mr. Aronofsky paints. They argue that the eating disorders and sexual exploits are stereotypes, and that the issues dancers face are over-dramatized to the point where the film borders on farce.

Diana Byer, the artistic director of the New York Theater Ballet, said that movies that try to dramatize ballet usually miss the mark by turning actors into caricatures of tortured artists, obsessed and tormented by their craft. “Dancers are people, they have a job like everybody else,” she said during a break in rehearsal last week. “A person who doesn’t live life can’t bring anything to a ballet. You have to live life to create an art form.”

Still, she made a point of seeing the movie soon after it came out, along with nearly everyone in her 14-member company. They debated Ms. Portman’s ballet techniques during breaks in practice, critiqued some of the dance performances and gushed over a few of the costumes. The fact is, it’s not every day that Hollywood portrays their art.

Their biggest complaint about the film, she said, wasn’t the melodramatic portrayal, the inaccuracies or the ugly stereotypes. It was that there was not enough dancing in it.”

Personal comment: Black Swan is a must-see for every dancer I know! I think every ballet student who is serious about dance as a career should see the film. Except for the ending I thought the portrayal of the inner workings of a ballet company were fairly accurate. I don’t think the stresses that dancers have to deal with in a hyper-competitive environment were over emphasized. There really are dancers with eating disorders, intense competition for roles, injuries from over-training and some paranoia too, at least to some extent in most major companies. A good company cares about the health of its dancers and requires bone density scans and weigh-ins to check on their dancer’s health.

Black Swan Oscar Buzz

Natalie Portman costumed as Nina Sayers

The New York Times
December 30, 2010

Natalie Portman Embraces Monster and Victim
By A. O. SCOTT

THE subject of “Black Swan” — a leading candidate for the most misunderstood film of 2010 — is the relationship, in art, between technique and emotion. Ballet, the specific art form in question, is shown to require endless practice and grueling physical discipline. Bodies, in particular the bodies of young women, are stretched and twisted into unnatural postures, and the cost of the fleeting, breathtaking grace they attain is reckoned in close-ups of battered, bloody feet and tendons pulled almost to the snapping point. The toe shoes that are among the principal tools of this torment also seem to be surrogates and scapegoats; they are scraped, mutilated and disfigured by the dancers in a symbolic re-enactment of the violence they perform upon themselves in their ruthless pursuit of perfection.

Is “Black Swan” a realistic portrayal of life in a ballet company? Probably not. Is it an overheated, wildly melodramatic rendering of an artist’s struggle? Without a doubt. And to scold the director, Darren Aronofsky, for what he doesn’t get about dancers or how he looks at women is almost deliberately to miss the point. This is, at bottom, a horror movie. It gathers psychological implications from its chosen milieu and makes them literal, giving flesh to wild metaphors of female sexuality and aesthetic risk.

“Black Swan” is no more about the behavior of ballerinas than its central pretext, “Swan Lake,” is about the habits of birds. It is, rather, an inky, unhinged fairy tale, a swirl of intuitions and sensations visited upon and realized through the body of its star, Natalie Portman.

Ms. Portman appears in nearly every frame of the movie, sometimes more than once. She is reflected in the mirrors that line the walls of the practice salles, in the windows of subway trains passing through dark tunnels, and in the faces of the mysterious doubles — strangers on the street and rivals in the company — that her character, Nina Sayers, mistakes for herself. Nina, who lives with her Freudian nightmare of a mother in a spooky Upper West Side apartment, is a hard-working dancer cast as the lead in a new, revisionist production of “Swan Lake.”

Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the artistic director who serves equally as handsome prince and evil sorcerer in Nina’s increasingly fevered imagination, pushes her to incarnate, within a single performance, both an ideal of inviolate femininity and its dark mirror image. His conception of the swan figure may not be subtle, and it certainly flirts with an old misogynist dualism — the pristine virgin versus the witchy seductress — but it provides the film, and Ms. Portman, with a dramatically potent idea. The white swan and the black represent, above all, the Apollonian and Dionysian poles of art, one restrained and rational, the other unruly, passionate and dangerous.

Thomas pushes Nina, whose delicacy and precision is never in doubt, to “let go,” and her contradictory effort to obey him — to perfect her performance by allowing spontaneity and imperfection into it — is what makes her and undoes her. The forced integration of the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses leads to the disintegration of her personality, a literal splitting into two Ninas that takes place in full view of the camera and also entirely, it seems, within the character’s mind.

All of this might be preposterously over the top were it not for Ms. Portman, who not only turns an abstraction into flesh and blood but also takes us inside Nina’s head and under her skin. Much has been made of the punishing regimen that Ms. Portman undertook to prepare for the role, and the results are both ravishing and frightening. When she is not dancing, and sometimes when she is, Nina’s slender, delicate frame can look starved and skeletal, her hollow cheeks and large eyes the features of a death’s head rather than a china doll. And she seems, with her mother and with Thomas, more like a terrified child than an accomplished professional with the skills of an athlete. She is, to some extent, the creature of these two dominating figures, with very little personality of her own and almost no ability to articulate her own desires or feelings other than by trembling, perpetually, on the verge of tears.

In keeping with the logic of “Swan Lake” her liberation — her realization of a self freed from the constraints of other people — takes the form of self-destruction, and it is in mapping this paradoxical process that Ms. Portman conducts her own brilliant counterpoint of instinct and technique. Mr. Aronofsky certainly creates a mood of paranoia and incipient madness, embellishing the traditional horror-movie idiom of tracking shots and shock cuts with eerie sound effects and digital tricks. Ms. Portman is dabbed with stage blood and digital goose flesh, stalked and spied on by the camera, wrapped in the jumped-up Tchaikovskian wail of Clint Mansell’s score.

But in the end it all comes down to the actress, who seems, before our eyes, to be participating in the invention of a new kind of screen performance. In its various iterations, the Method has been about using voice and gesture to express a character’s deep psychological truth. Ms. Portman, like other young actors working with filmmakers who emphasize the visceral and the immediate, seems almost to reverse this process. Nina’s psychological state is evidently part of the artifice of “Black Swan,” but her body, subject to unimaginable (and sometimes unreal) mutations and mutilations, is the film’s ground zero of authenticity.

The pivotal scene is a simple one: Nina, alone in the rehearsal studio, looks at her multiplying mirror images and loses control of them. What follows is a crescendo of madness leading up to her opening night triumph, during all of which it becomes increasingly difficult for the audience — or for Nina — to find the boundary between reality and fantasy. And it is a boundary that Ms. Portman succeeds in erasing by hurling herself, with reckless conviction, into Nina’s world and becoming both the monster and the victim in this horror movie.

Which is another way of saying that she is both the black swan and the white, both the perfectly controlled performer and the pure creature of instinct. We can assure ourselves that Nina does not really turn into a bird. We also know, being sane and disciplined moviegoers, that Ms. Portman — pregnant and engaged (to the movie’s choreographer) and happy in the wake of her latest professional triumph — is not Nina Sayers. But we also know, on the irrefutable evidence of our own eyes, and the prickly sensation of our skin, that she is.

Personal comment: With all the work Natalie Portman put into the role it would be wonderful if she was able to win an Oscar! Box office: Domestic Total as of Jan. 2, 2011: $47,370,000 (Estimate) Production budget, $13,000,000.

Natalie Portman pregnant by choreographer

An Ortho progestin/estrogen pill dial pack

Natalie Portman to wed `Black Swan' choreographer
Associated Press December 27, 2010

“NEW YORK - Natalie Portman is pregnant with her first child and is engaged to Benjamin Millepied, the choreographer of "Black Swan."

A publicist for Portman confirmed Monday that the couple are engaged and expecting, but declined to give any further details. People magazine first reported the news.

The 29-year-old actress and Millepied, a well-regarded ballet dancer and choreographer, met during the making of "Black Swan," Darren Aronofsky's psychological thriller that stars Portman as a ballet dancer. She's been nominated for best actress by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.

Millepied played a small on-screen role in the film as a dancer. Portman also stars in Ivan Reitman's upcoming romantic comedy, "No Strings Attached."”

Personal Comment: There goes her figure! Sigh! Because she isn’t a dancer she doesn’t have to stay in that great shape, but still… I wonder if there was a birth control method failure or if she forgot to take her pill or was taking another medicine that reduced the effectiveness of the hormones? Because of the timing that’s what I think happened. But, perhaps not, since she is almost 30 and nearing the age where her fertility will be decreasing. Maybe they just said “let’s go w/o protection and see what happens”… you think? Apparently this time the plumbing was working just fine.

And speaking of the effectiveness of hormonal birth control, below are the results of a large study testing the effectiveness of a 24/4 dosing regimen.


Real life tests of the effectiveness of oral contraceptives

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills.

Oral contraceptives boast annual unintended pregnancy rates well below 1 percent -- if used correctly and consistently, that is.

But in the not-so-perfect real world, longer lasting ingredients and shorter monthly breaks between active pills could prove useful in bolstering this form of birth control, hints a new study from Germany.

A typical monthly regimen of oral contraceptives includes 21 days of active pills -- usually containing a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone -- and a 7-day break of inactive sugar pills. The intent is to prevent pregnancy by obstructing ovulation, or the release of an egg during a woman's monthly cycle.

"Forgetting the first active pills of a treatment cycle has the biggest impact on contraceptive failure as this time interval may allow the process that leads to ovulation to start," Dr. Jurgen Dinger of the Berlin Center for Epidemiology and Health Research told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

To test whether decreasing the pill-free interval and using hormones with a longer duration of action may help counteract this common problem, Dinger and his colleagues studied more than 52,000 U.S. women who took part in the "International Active Surveillance of Women Taking Oral Contraceptive" study.

The participants' average age was 26 years, and each had started on a new contraceptive. More than 80 percent of the women had previously taken another version of the Pill.

The researchers did not interfere with the choice of oral contraceptive, but rather categorized the women into three groups based on their new hormone regimens: 21 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone (progesterone) plus 30 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol (estrogen); 24 days of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol, or another regimen.

The 21-day drospirenone regimen is currently sold under the brand name Yasmin and the 24-day regimen, with longer-lasting progesterone, is sold as Yaz. Generic versions are also available. Bayer Schering Pharma, maker of Yasmin, supported the study.

Over the course of 3 years following the women, more than 1,600 became pregnant unintentionally. About 1,400 of these contraceptive failures were due to an imperfect use of the Pill.

Unintended pregnancy rates for the 21-day and 24-day drospirenone regimens were 2.8 percent and 2.1 percent at the end of the first year, respectively, and 5.7 and 4.7 percent after the third year.

Women older than age 30 were significantly less likely than younger women to get pregnant unintentionally. Women with a college education and who had never carried a child were also less likely to become pregnant.

Obese women -- who made up nearly a quarter of the U.S. women studied -- had about a 50 percent greater risk of contraception failure after accounting for age, education level and whether or not they had prior children.

According to the researchers, under all the situations studied, the 24-day drospirenone regimen yielded more protection against pregnancy than the 21-day drospirenone regimen, as well as the other oral contraceptives.

However, compared to findings from the same study conducted in Europe, U.S. women showed an overall four-fold higher unintended pregnancy rate.

Dinger suggested that multiple factors could explain this gap in effectiveness, from higher rates of obesity in the U.S. to cultural, behavioural and genetic differences between the regions.

Dinger also noted that most programs that have tried to improve the proper use of the Pill have failed. "Our approach," he emphasized, "did not intend to investigate ways to improve compliance but to look at whether specific oral contraceptive regimens are more 'robust' against incompliance than others."

"This should not mitigate the need for good counseling of female adolescents and women intending to use the Pill," added Dinger. "A highly effective oral contraceptive regimen in conjunction with good counseling is the only way to minimize unintended pregnancies."

SOURCE: Obstetrics and Gynecology, online December 3, 2010. The full text of the article can be found at: http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2011/01000/Effectiveness_of_Oral_Contraceptive_Pills_in_a.6.aspx

Personal comment: We have known since the introduction of Yaz in the U.S. that the long half-life of drospirenone reduces the chance of breakthrough ovulation during the hormone free interval. Most students on oral contraceptives at St Lucy’s are on Yaz the 24/4 dosing regimen of 3 milligrams of drospirenone plus 20 micrograms of ethinyl estradiol. There are no obese students and roommates buddy to make sure each girl takes her pill at the same time daily. Even so there are times when a student is on meds that decrease the effectiveness of her pills and will ovulate and a few of these instances will result in the need for emergency contraception to avoid an unintended pregnancy. The availability of ella (the five-day EC pill) has increased the effectiveness of EC for St Lucy’s girls.


FDA Approves Gardasil for Prevention of Anal Cancer in Both Sexes

December 23, 2010 — FDA on Wednesday approved Merck's human papillomavirus vaccine, Gardasil, for the prevention of anal cancer in people ages nine through 26, Reuters reports. The vaccine already was approved to prevent cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers associated with HPV for the same age group.

On Wednesday, FDA cited data showing that Gardasil was effective in a study of men who have sex with men, a group that has a higher incidence of anal cancer than other populations. The agency said the data support the vaccine's efficacy in women because the disease is the same in both sexes.

Although anal cancer is less common than most other types of cancer, with about 5,300 new U.S. cases diagnosed annually, FDA said incidence of the disease is increasing (Krauskopf, Reuters, 12/22). About 90% of anal cancers are linked with HPV, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Solsman, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Karen Midthun, director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said, "Treatment for anal cancer is challenging; the use of Gardasil as a method of prevention is important, as it may result in fewer diagnoses and the subsequent surgery, radiation or chemotherapy that individuals need to endure."

As of the end of May, more than 65 million doses of Gardasil had been distributed since its 2006 approval, with sales reaching $1.1 billion as of 2009 (Reuters, 12/22). The vaccine once was expected to be a blockbuster for Merck, but sales have declined as more individuals are immunized and GlaxoSmithKline's HPV vaccine, Cervarix, provides more competition, according to Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal (Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, 12/22).

Personal comment: Starting last year our clinic began giving Gardasil injections to male dancers and all escort candidates as an off label use to protect men from anal cancer.