Like a dog that eats grass to binge and purge, so does Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan regurtitate an incredible amount of incongruencies and misconceptions about the dance world to its eager audiences. 'Have you seen Black Swan yet?' is the question of the week at school, and from what responses I hear (quite sadly, from dance students), I have no choice but to credit the film industry with yet another victory for yet another distorted portrayal of what life as a dancer is like.
The film has all the elements required for an authentic ballet drama. A quiet, sensitive heroine with her diabolical alter ego, an unaccomplished and controlling mother, a retiring diva that doesn't quite want to let go, and a despotic and pervy company director (the same characters as in Gore Vidal's 1954 black novel, Death in the Fifth Position , as Roger Salas points out in Spanish newspaper El Pais, together with many parallels in the plot- has anyone seen any reference to the novel in the film's credits?). Incidentally, these are also the dramatis personae of any Gothic horror you put your hands on.
Here lies the question. Do we read the film as a dance film, or as a Gothic-psycho thriller?
We couldn't call the film a documentary- it is too pseudo-Gothic for that- but then, we know how audiences loved to see the pointe-induced blood on the protagonist's feet in Save the Last Dance, and the best moments in The Kids From Fame was whenever Debbie Allen took out her cane to shout at some lycra-wearing student about how they would never make it on Broadway.
Aronofsky also knows this, or else he wouldn't feed us one cliché after another the way he does. A grapefuit as breakfast, ballerinas with severe mental issues that will stab each other for a role, no cake whatsoever for Miss Portman, many moments of bullimic purging in the toilet, and of course, a director that will gladly give you a raise in the company's ranks as long as you too give him a raise. It's our daily bread. In fact just today I nipped into the toilet before centre practice so that my tights would look baggy. I had my grapefuit after class.
Hamburg's own, John Neumeier, is understandably enraged:
'...The ballet world is pictured as inhabited by sick people, monstrous people abusing young anorexic girls. If you portray a foreign, unknown world like the ballet in this unhealthy, negative way, it will only be the bad things people will remember. People are unable to question the images shown and thus take them for granted...'
(Hamburger Abendblatt)
So, I ask you- if you belong to the dance community in any way-, even when this is a work of fiction, can you honestly enjoy and praise a film that perpetuates so many harmful myths? Perhaps I wouldn't be as bothered about this if it didn't hit so close to home. I suffered a lot, together with many other male dancers in Spain, thanks to misconceptions about homosexuality and dance. I wouldn't support anything that perpetuated these myths.
It is them that make the film attractive, not dance itself. Ballet has been relegated to a third plane and this is obvious due to its lack of quality in the film. First of all, Portman, who can act, is not a ballet dancer, and knowing this I still do not understand the many scenes where they insist on rehearsing the 'swan arms' which she simply cannot, and will not, do! She is not the posessor of the beautifully high arches that climb off her bed, as we later see when she writhes around in it. You have to wonder if there isn't a ballerina out there who can memorize a few lines and dance Odile, or at least move and carry herself as if she could dance it.
The choreographic arrangements by Benjamin Millepied (NYCB) are almost as tragic as Odette and Siegfried's fate. And the production which they rehearse is a Swan Lake I'd love to see - the fourth act takes place near a lake surrounded by huge dolmen-like structures and a steep staircase like the ones in the Aztec pyramids, up which Odette climbs to her death (Swan Lake meets Le Sacre, perhaps?). Dolmens aside, the production seemed a lot easier to watch than Anthony Dowell's for the RB, which I saw last Saturday and which was blindingly baroque.
Yes, you can watch this film and enjoy it as a thriller, and never think about it again until you start getting cuts on your fingers or grow some feathers. But the uninitatied in the world of dance will enjoy the thriller and be reaffirmed that yes, dance is all about anorexic, viciously ambititous and perverse people. I am left wondering why it is that general audiences love to hear about a dancer's woes, and not their joy. Neumeier also wonders this:
'...However, you would never accuse athletes of effecting performance and exercising, of putting special attention to their bodies and from time renouncing things. As a dancer you have to refrain from some things, of course - but there is so much reward in dancing. Human beings are free to choose and to judge what is good for them. Being a dancer is a privilege. Dancers are not as dependent or immature as portrayed in the movie. They are independent individuals who have their own ideas and actively contribute to the art of dancing. They question and, most importantly, they enjoy dancing."
