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."

Pointework, gender and desire

pointework, femininity and fantasy

The New York Times
August 4, 2010
By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

For Ballet, Plots Thicken, or Just Stick?

“DEAR friends,” the retired ballerina Gelsey Kirkland wrote in an open letter on the Web site for the new Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet (gelseykirklandballet.org), “I have come to believe over the years that the future of ballet lies in the art of dramatic storytelling, drawing on the wellsprings of classical tradition.” The school’s mission statement underscores this belief: “To encourage a renaissance of dramatic storytelling in ballet by providing specialized training for gifted students and by establishing a classically oriented studio company capable of creating new dramatic works.”

Ballet, as Ms. Kirkland knows, has been telling dramatic stories since at least the 18th century. Yet throughout that time storytelling has often been uphill work for ballet. The pure-dance sections, which provide a release from the acting and mime portions, slow down the narrative, putting a story ballet on pause for long periods. And the ballets that have pared away pure dance to maintain a constant narrative thrust have seldom achieved lasting popularity or classic status.

Some of the complaints in the 18th century were just the same as those today: too much dancing or not enough; some stories make incomplete sense while others seem unsuited to dance; some star dancers are poor actors. Ms. Kirkland may or may not be right about ballet’s future, but she and her fellow believers certainly have their work cut out for them.

Nowhere more than in narrative has ballet become the land of low expectations. Audiences regularly sit through a poverty of dance-narrative expression that they would never tolerate in a movie, a novel, an opera, a play or even a musical. I will defend the escapism of “The Nutcracker,” but I cringe at the sensationalism, the triteness and the ham that characterize the majority of story ballets, works like “Don Quixote,” “Le Corsaire” and “La Bayadère.” “Spartacus,” the Bolshoi Ballet’s biggest hit of the last half-century, reduces its freedom-fighting story to the dimensions of trash (irresistible and sensational trash in the right performance), as enjoyable as “Flash Gordon” and scarcely more serious.

Interestingly, Ms. Kirkland’s words come just as a wave of narrative dance drama has been gathering force. At New York City Ballet — the company that consistently did the most to propagate plotlessness in 20th-century classical ballet — the past season was mainly given over to full-evening story ballets. Of the eight new ballets produced by the company so far in 2010, each by different choreographers, four have been storytelling, while a fifth, Alexei Ratmansky’s “Namouna,” has arcane suggestions of narrative.

Mr. Ratmansky, who is also American Ballet Theater’s artist in residence, has created ballets with and without stories. But mainly with, and his storyless ballets have often implied characters, incidents, nonabstract situations. His first Ballet Theater creation, “On the Dnieper” (2009), was a rare Prokofiev love story, while currently he is preparing the company’s new “Nutcracker” and also its first production of his 2003 comedy “The Bright Stream”: narratives both.

Christopher Wheeldon, though he came to fame with plotless ballets (notably “Polyphonia” in 2001), has been of late increasingly preoccupied with stories, like “Estancia,” which had its premiere at City Ballet this season, and next year’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which the Royal Ballet will stage. Meanwhile (though outside ballet) the choreographer with the greatest international box office success is Matthew Bourne, who has made nothing but full-length narratives since 1994. (His “Swan Lake” returns to New York for a month in the fall at City Center.)

So it is indeed story time. What stories, though? In “Estancia,” “Namouna,” Benjamin Millepied’s “Why am I not where you are,” Alexey Miroshnichenko’s “Lady With the Little Dog” and Melissa Barak’s “Call Me Ben,” ballet is stuck merely in romantic-comedy variations on the same old “boy seeks girl, boy finds girl” ballet situation.

Today the traditional “Swan Lake” is usually played like a sentimental “women’s” movie: the swan-queen Odette gives her heart to Prince Siegfried even though he promptly proves himself Prince Wrong by plighting his troth to her wicked lookalike Odile, and of course the martyred Odette then goes on loving him. But both scenario and choreography are more interesting than that: they leave it wholly ambiguous about whether she ever returns his love. She merely needs him to love her so that she may find release from swan form; and the choreography, which focuses on her indecision, shows just how mixed her feelings are about committing herself to accepting his support.

In her constant need to keep withdrawing from him, and her muted response to his ardor, the real suggestion that used to emerge was that she felt unable ever fully to respond to him, as if sensing a reluctant frigidity within herself that she could not eradicate. That’s a far more interesting psychodrama that the one we usually see onstage today.

The expressive possibilities of ballet are increasingly constricted today by the way it hinges on the dichotomy of gender. Once the genre acquired pointework in the early 19th century, it acquired a tragic dimension. A heroine on point is existentially different from the hero; she becomes the Other.

It has sometimes been said that adultery was the great subject of the 19th-century novel. Well, adultery was the great fantasy underlying most of the great 19th-century ballets too. The hero, though engaged or married to one woman, couldn’t help loving another (whom of course he could never, ever marry because she was a sylph or working class — never, at any rate, the kind he could take home to meet Mama). To the hero and to the audience, pointework said, “in your dreams.” The heroine of “La Sylphide,” “Giselle,” “La Bayadère,” “Swan Lake” and many other ballets was what the hero thought he wanted but knew he couldn’t have.

In the last century the male-female dichotomy made for yet more remarkable drama. Many of the finest male choreographers — George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Kenneth MacMillan (Ms. Kirkland danced for all of them) — used pointework expressively, so that a woman’s feet became detailed and powerful expressions of her femininity. The contrasts between man and woman in their ballets helped to make the mid-20th century the greatest era for choreography in ballet’s history.

There used to be an antagonism between narrative and plotless ballet. One set of modernists (led by Tudor) argued that ballet was about psychological communication; the other (led by Balanchine) argued that it was about dancing classically. It’s possible that Ms. Kirkland wants to reignite this debate, but I doubt it. Unlike Ms. Kirkland and her peers, most ballet dancers today belong to companies that perform both pure-dance works and, say, “Romeo and Juliet.” It’s easy now to see that Balanchine, Tudor, et al. excelled in both idioms.

What’s more, it’s easier for audiences now to see that the 20th-century pure-dance ballet was never abstract. As Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris all observed, you cannot have abstraction where there are human beings on a stage. Put a man and a woman onstage, Balanchine liked to say, and you already have a story; it has been well said that his plotless ballets actually have more drama than most story ballets.

But society in recent decades has grown far more fluid in its ideas of gender distinctions. Equal rights in the workplace and outside it have been increasingly achieved; various shades of androgyny have been acceptable or fashionable for decades; same-sex marriage is a widespread issue.

Much modern dance reflects various aspects of these blurring lines. Yet ballet still insists on the same either-or distinctions — even makes them more crucial than before. Point work is now a more ubiquitous condition of ballet femininity than it ever was in the 19th century; men, however, may go on point only for an eccentric or animal effect. The man must partner the woman in supported pirouettes; the woman may not return the compliment, and the device is never practiced in same-sex situations. There is also far more lifting — by men of women — than ever before. (John Neumeier’s “Lady of the Camellias,” which joined American Ballet Theater’s repertory in June, is an especially crass example.) Though “pas de deux” means “steps for two,” it is not unusual to hear dancers now use the term to mean the task of lifting and supporting women.

Sure, there have been a very few same-sex duets and a few sequences of male-female parallel-and-equal (unisex) dancing too, but those are never where ballet comes into its own. Almost every ballet, storytelling or otherwise, features at least one partnering passage, usually central, in which the differences between men and women are highlighted. How well equipped is this genre to speak to, or of, the world we know? Will the choreographers of the 21st century change the genre’s ingredients so that it becomes less automatically sexist? Or will they change the dramas that flow from its heterosexual rituals? Most crucially: What future does ballet have as an art of modern expression?

That future may be sci-fi, chick flick, historical costume drama or post-hip-hop body popping: it’s anybody’s guess. But a 21st-century art that knows no alternative to bringing men and women together in situations of love, chivalry or arrant manhandling will retain obvious limitations. Story ballet today is in danger of becoming a particularly sexist form of rom-com.

Personal comment: First I’d like to wish Gelsey Kirkland great success with her new Gelsey Kirkland Academy of Classical Ballet. She had left ABT before I arrived in NYC so I never got to see her perform live, just on video and she was a lovely dancer. Her research in preparation for a role is legendary so I hope she shares a bit of that with her students. I have taken a few classes that she taught and I learned a lot in a short time, mostly about focus and discipline as she can be very demanding.

Now about the rest of Alastair Macaulay’s article. On the one hand he says:

“Once the genre acquired pointework in the early 19th century, it acquired a tragic dimension. A heroine on point is existentially different from the hero; she becomes the Other.” And he says: “To the hero and to the audience, pointework said, “in your dreams.”

Then he goes on to say:

“Point work is now a more ubiquitous condition of ballet femininity than it ever was in the 19th century; men, however, may go on point only for an eccentric or animal effect. The man must partner the woman in supported pirouettes; the woman may not return the compliment, and the device is never practiced in same-sex situations.”

So? A woman supporting a man who is 40+ pounds heavier and an additional 6 inches taller than she is when en pointe? Get a grip! And, what’s this about “never practiced in same sex situations”? You want Bruce and Tim en pointe as Harley mechanics in a hog shop? Or to bourrée couru down the aisle during a same-sex wedding? I can tell you that with the exception of male comedy dance troupes like the Trocks males en pointe are very much an acquired taste and even then only in cabarets in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Bangkok.

As long as the human species continues to propagate through sexual intercourse between male and female the female will try to make herself as feminine as possible to attract men, and pointework is an unbelievably powerful attractive force for women who can use it properly. With love, lust, envy and jealousy as drivers in relationships between the sexes a woman en pointe is the stuff of fantasy. Here in Vegas we have been successfully accommodating that male fantasy ever since I became AD of the casino’s ballet company.