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.