La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

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      A documentary by Frederick Wiseman. In French and English with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Monday to Thursday, December 21 to 24, and Friday to Sunday, January 1 to 3, at the Vancity Theatre

      Just how exclusive a glimpse into the tutu-bedecked, behind-the-scenes world of the Paris Opera Ballet is cinéma vérité icon Frederick Wiseman’s new film? There’s a moment in the documentary when fundraisers ask artistic director Brigitte Lefèvre to grant the wish of the “big benefactors’”—the ones who donate $25,000 and up—to watch 15 minutes of rehearsal and she politely refuses, saying space is too tight.

      Luckily for dance fans, Wiseman was not so easily dismissed. The result is a sumptuous, two-hour-and-40-minute feast of ballet, with some of the world’s top performers labouring at their craft in atmospheric domed halls and being coached, soothed, and even berated by their taskmasters. Choreographer Wayne McGregor is almost like a voyeur as he closely circles a passionately tangling duet and barks counts; when étoile Emilie Cosette struggles to tap the motives of her murderous mother in Médée, Angelin Preljocaj gently tells her: “It’s a state you can’t define, but once you’re on-stage with blood all over”¦you’ll see.” And, later, we do too.

      As always in Wiseman’s films, La Danse takes a fly-on-the-wall approach with no narration and no interviews. The cumulative effect of all the intercut rehearsals and, eventually, vignettes from the final performances is rich and multilayered. La Danse becomes a movie about an art form that has one pointe shoe planted in the 19th century but is trying to place the other firmly in the 21st: these prima ballerinas can perform the perfect pirouettes of a Dégas-pretty Nutcracker, but just watch them contort and twist in McGregor’s angular and electrocharged Genus. It’s also about the fleeting nature of ballet, not just in the passing moments of the dance but for the aging dancers. Lefí¨vre rationalizes their forced retirement at 40 by stating that the dancer is both “the race car and its driver”.

      Wiseman is best known for documenting some fairly unglamorous facilities—from a 1960s asylum to an inner-city hospital—but for all its beauty, La Danse is a portrait of an institution and the machine that runs it. However, with zero explanation of what the works are or who the ballerinas are—don’t look here to find out what their life is like outside this domed universe—this is a film for dance fans. But Wiseman’s quiet looks at seamstresses painstakingly hand-stitching sequins to frothy tutus? Well, even the biggest benefactors wouldn’t get to see that.

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