Tag: ballet

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Kicked Out of Ballet School

If you are a male hockey player and you invest a huge chunk of your life in the pursuit of a career as a professional hockey player and you reach a fairly high level– say, Junior A– and then one year you don’t make the team, how would you describe what happened? I think you probably say you had been cut. You couldn’t make the team. You couldn’t keep up.

I just heard the author of “Various Positions”, Martha Schabas, describe how the same thing happened to her when she was around 15, and a student at the National Ballet School of Canada. I thought it was interesting that she didn’t use the word “cut”. She said she was “kicked out”.

Call me sexist if you like: I don’t think a male would use that term to describe what has happened when you are no longer good enough to make the team. That’s the phrase you might use if you wanted to indicate that you had broken a rule, or had a fight with an assistant coach, or failed a drug test or something: you got kicked out. If you were removed from the team because you weren’t good enough, however, you were just “cut”.

For the record, I don’t believe all girls would use that phrase either.

“Kicked out” implies that you were part of a group, the in-crowd, an association of like-minded individuals with a mutual self-interest. And then, outrageously, you were “kicked out”. Excluded. Unjustly deprived of membership.

Incidentally, Martha Schabas’ book, “Various Positions”, is about “Georgia”, a 14-year-old ballet dancer who lusts for and seeks sexual relationships with adult men. Without, apparently, the disapproval of the writer/narrator.

A number of reviewers on Goodreads complained about that. But I suppose she could argue she is just describing reality, and the reviewers are being politically correct.

The title, by the way, obviously alludes to a Leonard Cohen album by the same title.

The coach of Canada’s national women’s hockey team, Shannon Miller, once cancelled the team Christmas Party because she didn’t like their attitude during or after a loss to the Americans.

I will never understand why the players didn’t simply announce that they would have the party without Shannon Miller. What would she do? Call the police?

Kick them off the team?

Well, maybe. Shannon Miller would have cut the ring-leaders from the team. If you would have asked her if that was fair, I don’t think she would have been troubled by the issue at all: they were disloyal. Membership on the team is a favor bestowed by me. That’s enough.

I frankly don’t believe it’s likely that a very good player would make the team if she did not at least pretend to hold the coach in high regard.

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The Black Swan

“Joan Crawford would have killed to play her. ” NY Times, on “Black Swan”.

And noted: “Dancers often spend more of their time in front of the mirror than before an audience”.

Okay– first of all I do want to say this: I think Natalie Portman is one of the most enlightened, smartest actresses working today. You may not want to see her as inspiration for your acting technique, but she is model of wisdom in every other respect. I’m not kidding– check out what she does and says in her non-Hollywood life. She’s very, very wise.

I’m going to add to that– Natalie Portman is at a priceless, searing stage of her life. She is smart enough to perceive the twisted effects of celebrity (the perverse obsession with her role in “Leon: The Professional” for example and the sexualization of her image as a boyish naïf from all of her movies), but not old enough yet to resign herself to it. She expects better. But she is pleasingly reflective and down to earth and astute and it will be sad when she stops commenting on it and it becomes a part of her permanent emotional armour and we will have lost something.

However…

The biggest problem with “Black Swan” is that director Darren Aronovsky and star Natalie Portman– who, by the way, is really a terrible actress– never really shows you the payoff: a talented dancer at work. They don’t know how. Watch fifteen minutes of Mike Leigh’s “Topsy Turvey”, or even “The Red Shoes”, and then try to tell me it’s not possible. It absolutely is. “The Black Swan”, in fact, makes the worst mistake a movie of this type can make: it wallows in the suffering without even hinting at the reward, and in this kind of narrative, the only satisfactory explanation for the suffering– aside from pure monotonous psychosis– is the glory of the reward.

Just one example: at one point the director threatens to take the role away from Nina because she hasn’t demonstrated sufficient passion (which, cringingly, is linked to the director’s sexual fantasies). We are left clueless about just how wrenching, in real life, a decision like that would be. We are left with the impression of a parent threatening to take dessert away from a child if she doesn’t do her homework. We are left with the impression that the director actually chose, as his star of this production, someone he clearly believes is incapable of performing it.

It’s not really like he realizes he made a mistake. It’s like this: the viewer realizes that the director could never really had a good reason for choosing her in the first place, and the story loses all sense of believability.

We are left with the impression that someone else could just step into the role, precisely the opposite of what the director thinks the audience will think as Natalie Portman crinkles her face unpleasantly and weeps to tell us instead how much she suffers for her art.

I’ve said it before– the rule about showing a believable drunken man is to produce a man trying (and failing) to stand straight– not someone trying to look like he is falling over. Natalie Portman, for 90 minutes, looks like she’s trying to fall apart.

Joan Crawford or Bette Davis could have played this.

Why was Leslie Manville from “Another Year” not nominated for a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar?  Well, aside from the obvious– no powerful Hollywood machinery working on her behalf to get her the nomination– well… that’s about it.  That’s why she doesn’t get the nomination.  That’s why so many mediocre actors and actresses do get nominated.

So when Natalie Portman gets all tearful in a few weeks, convinced that her peers really chose her for this award, for her acting, for her dedication, for her unremarkable impersonation of a ballet dancer in a few select shots….   think about that last shot of Leslie Manville in “Another Year” realizing that whatever it is Tom and Geri have…. she doesn’t.

That is, simply, truly great acting– not the showy pseudo-method business that wins you Oscars.