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.

Ballet sex, Sarah Lane and Topamax

Sarah Lane’s Capezio Glisse with verses from Isaiah & Psalms inscribed on the fore-sole.

Jack, and more about ballet sex: “I certainly can understand that men could fetishize sex with ballerinas. After all they are meant to be females in search of physical beauty and perfection of form and movement of their bodies in an archetype of female beauty. The same goes of course for the extended line en pointe. So in a sense a conquest of a prima (or perhaps not so prima) ballerina would be a coveted accomplishment regardless of how adroit she actually was at "sex". The notion that ballerinas or dancers or gymnasts who have developed advanced control, flexibility and muscle tone of their bodies carries with it the notion that would be superior lovers to those females who lack this level of body development. This of course, applies to those who have a keen interest in "gymnastic" type of sexual positions for fornication. I personally find contortionist sex mostly unappealing, but certainly appreciate a fine toned and flexible and strong female lover. I have no experience with females who have trained their vagina as Jill discusses, both for their own pleasure and that of the male's cock which enters it in sex. I suspect, that cocks (and men who have them) are not terribly sensitive too a huge variety of stimuli as part of sexual stimulation. This is not to reduce coitus to an overly very simple mechanical interaction of cock with the walls and structure of the vagina. So I can only take Jill's many comments on the subject at face value, because I have neither direct personal experience with such females who have enormous control of the vaginal cavity nor have heard of same from others. Yet I do know from personal experience, that all pussies and sex with them are not the same, but the variations are not terribly vast considering the basic difference of size and lubrication. I'm all for some double blind experiments!”

Jack on his Sarah Lane Plans: “I'm going to make an effort to speak with Ms Lane in the coming months as I have a project next door to ABT on 890 Broadway and see if I can get her scoop on the controversy and show her some support. Stay tuned. I won't be discussing pointe sex however.”

I hope you will be successful in discussing the controversy with her and I look forward to learning what she has to say. I agree, I’m fairly sure you won’t be discussing pointe sex with a dancer who inscribes passages from the Old Testament on her pointe shoes. In the Photo above quotations from the verses she inscribed are:

“The Lord will be your everlasting light” (Isaiah. 60:20)

“Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love” Psalm 107

These passages may help explain why she seems so disappointed in some ways with her Hollywood - Black Swan experiences.

Topamax and contraception: Last week I was volunteering at the clinic when a UNLV grad student came in. She is in the Cosplay group and has been using Topamax (topiramate) to control migraines and since it makes her hormonal contraceptive pills less effective she has been using one of the latex Reflexions flat spring diaphragms she was fitted with [See my entry: for October 18th 2010 entitled ‘Ballet Cosplay & Horizontal Academics’] as backup. Several months ago she ran out of spermicide and decided she didn’t need to use any so she had been inserting her diaphragm ‘dry’, without spermicide. Topamax also increases the risk of birth defects in pregnant women and she had tested positive for hCG several weeks ago so she had finally decided to terminate the pregnancy. She was in for a menstrual extraction and I helped prepare her and sat holding her hand while our Gyn prepped her, dilated her cervix, inserted the cannula and sucked out her endometrium along with the fetus. It was over in less that 45 minutes and she seemed to tolerate the procedure well. However, afterward even with the risk of birth defects she regretted having the abortion. She came to us so her friends at school wouldn’t find out and she hadn’t told her boyfriend who is in school in LA and was the father. She was given a ten days supply of antibiotics and told not to have penetrative sex for two weeks. Two days later she disappeared from school and no one has seen her since.

Blogger Dynamic Views: For those readers who are learning about the 5 Dynamic View options available on Blogger starting on Thursday March 31, 2011 I have turned off the Dynamic Views feature on my blog, at least for now. I’m beginning to think Google needs to fix the problems bloggers have rather than rolling out more bells and whistles… grumble, grumble. Sigh!

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."

Pointe; on the making of Black Swan

The "Swan Lake" corps, including Natalie Portman as Nina

Pointe Magazine
By Jennifer Stahl
Published in the December 2010/January 2011 issue.

The Price of Perfection

Sarah Lane is standing onstage holding a syringe of fake blood. “When do you want me to start dripping it?” she yells out to the house. It’s the last day of filming the dance scenes in Black Swan, and I’m sitting next to director Darren Aronofsky inside SUNY Purchase’s Performing Arts Center. The atmosphere on set reminds me of a tech rehearsal as dancers stand around waiting while crew members fiddle with the lights. But the combination of familiar dancer faces, high-profile Hollywood big shots and the bizarre scene they’re filming seems almost surreal.

A crew member comes over to suggest that they digitally sub the blood in later, using the same technique the director did with the staples in Mickey Rourke’s skin in The Wrestler. Aronofsky says no. He wants to try it with the real (fake) blood. I cringe, imagining how each 30-second take is going to ruin a perfectly good pair of $80 pointe shoes.

The word “rolling” echoes three times through the theater and Act III Swan Lake music screeches out of the speakers. The corps, dressed in white swan tutus with gray scratch marks around their eyes and blackened finger tips, runs in Petipa’s familiar patterns. Lane rises to bourrée and starts squeezing the syringe. A camera rolling at ankle level trails after her pointe shoes, which are quickly drenched in red. It’s clear that this is not going to be your typical dance film.

With any new movie about ballet, dancers both anticipate and dread Hollywood’s take on their world. Black Swan, the latest addition to the genre, hits theaters December 1. But while Aronofsky includes a few of the expected clichés—bulimic purging, a pushy stage mom, the requisite pointe shoe breaking-in and bloody-foot shots—the movie is a much darker depiction of dancers than what usually makes it to the screen. Black Swan is less an intimate portrait of life in the studio and more a horror film about obsession gone awry, the moment when dedication becomes destruction. Even the color pink takes on a menacing tinge.

The story focuses on a performance of Swan Lake and mirrors the ballet’s plot—but takes it in a nightmarish direction. Nina (Natalie Portman), an eager, naïve soloist at a fictional New York City ballet company, has just been cast as Odette/Odile, and is determined to be “perfect” in her first principal role. Yet she has been so sheltered by her life in ballet that embodying the black swan’s sensuality becomes an agonizing struggle. The company’s artistic director (Vincent Cassell) urges Nina to let go, to lose control, to be more like Lily (Mila Kunis), a new company member who effortlessly oozes sex appeal—and who also looks eerily like Nina and seems to be angling for her part. As Nina follows the director’s advice, she becomes possessed by her desire to pull off an impeccable performance. The line between reality and hallucination grows murkier for both her character and the audience in increasingly bizarre, even gruesome scenes. A sinister version of Tchaikovsky’s score plays through nearly every scene, creating an intensely dramatic backdrop.

The corps is supplied by Pennsylvania Ballet dancers on post-Nutcracker layoff, plus a handful of freelancers. Portman and Kunis were given ballet back up by American Ballet Theatre’s Sarah Lane and Maria Riccetto, respectively. The two perform as body doubles in studio and stage scenes, dancing Swan Lake choreography that has a slightly contemporary update courtesy of New York City Ballet’s Benjamin Millepied. “Ben wanted to keep the classical choreography,” says Aronofsky, “but I told him to make it funkier. Now it even has traces of the funky chicken.”

With such high-powered ballet talent, it’s disappointing how little dancing made it into the final product. And a few balletic missteps are distracting: There’s oddly only one cast with no understudy, and the lead is never called “Odette/Odile,” but “Swan Queen.” However, behind the heavy-handed horror, Aronofsky captures the mentality of a perfectionistic, self-destructive dancer with disturbing accuracy. By cutting the film loose from the confines of realism, he shows from the inside out the psychological toll that ballet takes on dancers.

Still, building an R-rated thriller out of the world of ballet seems like an odd choice. Aronofsky, though, says it was simply a natural consequence of taking everything—from the characters to the colors of the sets and costumes—from the original ballet. “If you look at Swan Lake, it’s actually very gothic, dark and tragic,” he says. “When you turn the fairy tale into a real-world story, that tone carries over.”

Aronofsky began working on the project about 10 years ago when he came across a script titled The Understudy, set in the world of off-Broadway theater. He had always been fascinated by ballet (his sister studied it seriously growing up), so he hired a writer to revamp the screenplay using Petipa’s ballet as a jumping-off point. “Ballet was something that I never understood or grasped, but was a world unto itself,” says Aronofsky. “And, like wrestling, it’s a world most people haven’t seen from the inside.”

He made a couple of movies in the interim, but Black Swan stuck in his mind. So after wrapping The Wrestler, he decided to dust off the script and examine performers on the opposite end of the high-low art spectrum. “We spent a year researching to fully understand the psychology of a ballerina, the nuances and character traits,” says producer Scott Franklin. Dancers such as former NYCB principal Heather Watts and ABT’s Gillian Murphy and Julie Kent provided the filmmakers with insight and backstage access. “I started to realize this profession is incredibly difficult and very painful, even,” Aronofsky says. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, how do I capture that?’ ”

Key to his vision was casting an extremely capable screen actress who could dig deep into the mind of a disturbed dancer. He hired Portman, who did her homework as well, immersing herself in the world of ballet to fully understand her character. “I was definitely inspired by the type of dancer who’s a ‘bunhead,’ very much infantilized by her work,” says Portman, whose ingenious performance is already receiving Oscar buzz. “There’s the high-pitched voice, the desire to please, the total surrender to a male director.”

To conquer the balletic demands of the role, she took daily private classes for 10 months before filming, and got additional swan-specific coaching from the late ABT ballet mistress Georgina Parkinson. “Getting the arms right was especially important for me because much of the film is shot very close up,” Portman says. Lane stands in for the character’s major dancing in wide shots (sometimes using digital face replacement technology) as well as in close-ups on the hands and feet. But Portman does the majority of her own dancing, mostly in the takes that focus on her upper body. Although she is sometimes stiff and awkward, her swan arms are surprisingly convincing.

While Portman spent days in the studio working on choreography, the professional dancers were given only a handful of hours to learn their steps. They rehearsed briefly before filming to make any needed adjustments, such as tweaking traffic patterns to accommodate the cameraman. “The most challenging part was to repeat every single movement thousands of times,” says Riccetto. Sarah Hay, who plays one of the corps dancers in the film, adds that they had to keep pushing themselves for each take, since they never knew which was going to be used. Most saw this as an opportunity they don’t get with live performance. “We would work for hours on one tiny set of movements, just perfecting and perfecting them,” Lane remembers. From talking to the dancers about the filming process, it’s apparent just how astutely Aronofsky captured their perfectionism.

In a way, the authenticity with which Black Swan highlights this particular dimension of ballet draws attention to what Aronofsky left out: the thrill of moving, the joy of creating art with your body, the high of a great performance. Black Swan is a brilliant snapshot of ballet’s dark side. But, although we all know the vicious black swan is the sexier role, it’s too bad moviegoers will miss out on seeing the beauty of the white.

Jennifer Stahl is Pointe’s senior editor.

Personal comment: Another take on the film. Black Swan is not yet playing here, Sigh! It’s nice to see that ABT dancers Sarah Lane and Maria Riccetto are mentioned as body doubles for the foot, leg and long shot scenes where technique matters. The link to the above article is HERE.

Black Swan - the NYT review

Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen

The New York Times
December 2, 2010
Movie Review 'Black Swan'

On Point, on Top, in Pain
By MANOHLA DARGIS

A witchy brew of madness and cunning, “Black Swan” tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to break out of the corps. Played by Natalie Portman in a smashing, bruising, wholly committed performance, the young dancer, Nina, looks more like a child than a woman, her flesh as undernourished as her mind. When she goes to bed at night, a nearby jewelry box tinkling “Swan Lake,”a crowd of stuffed animals watches over her, longtime companions that — as Nina and this dementedly entertaining film grow more unhinged — begin to look more like jailers than friends.

Crammed with twins — lookalikes, mirrored images, doppelgängers — the story follows that of the “Swan Lake” ballet in broad, gradually warped strokes. It opens with the artistic director of a fictional New York ballet company, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), announcing that the new season will begin with a “visceral and real” version of that old favorite. To that end he dumps his prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder), and picks Nina to dance the dual role of the swan queen (an enchanted woman in bird form) and her villainous black twin. But as the pressure builds, things fall apart, or Nina does. She stumbles out of a spin and begins scratching at her skin. One day she strips a piece from her finger as lightly as if she were peeling a banana.

Part tortured-artist drama, “Black Swan” looks like a tony art-house entertainment. (Hey, there’s Lincoln Center!) But what gives it a jolt is its giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation-cinema savvy. The director Darren Aronofsky is a well-schooled cinéaste, and in “Black Swan” he riffs on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” and the pair’s “Black Narcissus,” among other influences. But it’s also likely that Mr. Aronofsky, who was born in 1969 and grew up in Brooklyn, frequented Times Square when it was known as the deuce and lined with movie palaces playing the best and worst in trash cinema. I bet he also caught a few episodes of the “Red Shoe Diaries” on cable.

That isn’t a knock. One of the pleasures of “Black Swan” is its lack of reverence toward the rarefied world of ballet, which to outsiders can look as lively as a crypt. Mr. Aronofsky makes this world (or his version of it) exciting partly by pulling back the velvet curtains and showing you the sacrifices and crushingly hard work that goes into creating beautiful dances. Nina doesn’t just pirouette prettily, she also cracks her damaged toes (the sound design picking up every crackle and crunch) and sticks her fingers down her throat to vomit up her food. Mostly, though, she trains hard, hammering her toe shoes into floor much as Jake La Motta pounded his fists into flesh. She’s a contender, but also a martyr to her art.

Mr. Aronofsky is happy to see her bleed. A filmmaker who likes to play around with genre while mixing the highbrow with the lowdown and dirty, he has built a small, vivid catalog by exploring human extremes with wildly uneven degrees of visual wow, sensitivity and intelligence. He trawled the lower depths in “Requiem for a Dream” and struggled to scale the metaphysical heights with “The Fountain,” a fable about eternal (as in, when will it end?) love. For his previous movie, “The Wrestler,” he proved his commercial smarts by taking Mickey Rourke out of deep freeze and dusting off a comeback story that was old when Wallace Beery wiped Jackie Cooper’s runny nose with the script for “The Champ.”

“Black Swan,” by contrast, surprises despite its lusty or rather sluttish predilection for clichés, which include the requisitely demanding impresario (Mr. Cassel makes a model cock of the walk) and Nina’s ballerina rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, as a succulent, borderline rancid peach). But, oh, what Mr. Aronofsky does with those clichés, which he embraces, exploits and, by a squeak, finally transcends.

Such is his faith in his ability to surmount the obvious (and the lethally blunt) that he turns Nina’s mother, Erica (a terrific Barbara Hershey), into a smother-mother who out-crazies Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford in the mommy dearest department. You don’t know whether to laugh or shriek (both are reasonable responses), and it is this uncertainty and at times delicious unease that proves to be Mr. Aronofsky’s sweet spot.

It’s easy to read “Black Swan” as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web. The screenplay, by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, invites pop-psychological interpretations about women who self-mutilate while striving for their perfect selves, a description that seems to fit Nina. But such a reading only flattens a film that from scene to scene is deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching.

With “Black Swan” Mr. Aronofsky has found a surprisingly accommodating vehicle for his preoccupations, including bodies in pain, and his ever more refined technique. Here, working with his usual cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and largely shooting hand-held in both super-16-millimeter film and digital, Mr. Aronofsky opts for grit over gloss, an ideal strategy for a story with a harsh underbelly. Hand-held cinematography can be lazy shorthand for “reality” (as if life happens in shaky-cam), but here the hand-held visuals work because of their intimacy. The influence of the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen in the close, tag-along shots of Nina’s head as she hurries off, a point of view that brings you within breathing, at times panting, distance of a character whose behavior can be off-putting.

Though it had its moments, “The Wrestler” felt like the work of a director who, after proving his street bona fides and bombing at the box office, decided to try some pandering. It worked: Mr. Rourke was rediscovered, and Mr. Aronofsky’s future was salvaged, in part because he had closed the distance between the fallen star played by Mr. Rourke and the one he himself had become. Ms. Portman’s performance in “Black Swan” is more art than autobiography, and as a consequence more honest, but because it’s so demandingly physical the lines that usually divide actresses from their characters are also blurred. This is, after all, Ms. Portman’s own thin body on display, her jutting chest bones as sharply defined as a picket fence.

Although Mr. Aronofsky focuses on her head, shoulders and arms, mostly avoiding long shots that might betray a lack of technique, Ms. Portman does most of her own dancing (and plausibly, at least to this ballet naïf). The vision of Ms. Portman’s own body straining with so much tremulous, tremendous effort, her pale arms fluttering in desperation, grounds the story in the real, as do the totemic Lincoln Center buildings, the clattering subway and the grubby, claustrophobic apartment Nina shares with her mother. Together they create the solid foundation of truth that makes the slow-creeping hallucinatory flights of fantasy all the more jolting and powerful. Much like the new version of “Swan Lake” that Thomas creates, “Black Swan” is visceral and real even while it’s one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

“Black Swan” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bedroom gymnastics and graphic violence.

BLACK SWAN

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, based on a story by Mr. Heinz; director of photography, Matthew Libatique; edited by Andrew Weisblum; music by Clint Mansell; ballet choreography by Benjamin Millepied; production design by Thérèse DePrez; costumes by Amy Westcott, ballet costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte; produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy/the Gentleman), Mila Kunis (Lily/the Black Swan), Barbara Hershey (Erica Sayers/the Queen) and Winona Ryder (Beth Macintyre/the Dying Swan).

Personal Comment: I’m so pleased that the NYT critic liked the film! Not that a critical success necessarily translates into a box office success. It has to be liked by the ticket buying public but that a film and dance critic for the Times thought it was great really helps. Sarah Lane, a Soloist for American Ballet theater, is the body double for Natalie during dance scenes where ballet technique mattered.

Sarah Lane ABT Soloist and Portman’s body double