My recollection of Ballet from the one time I saw it in 1995 on PBS was of the incredible dance numbers, especially “Rite of Spring” and “Romeo and Juliet”, with the Parthenon peeking through from the top of the outdoor theater where the American Ballet Theater was performing. I remembered it as principally a performance film, certainly a major departure from what Wiseman had done previously, obviously a long way from slaughterhouses and welfare offices. This time it felt like a completely different film, probably because I’m seeing these close together, different from my memory and a film with much more continuity with other Wiseman films. Now, especially for the first hour and forty-five minutes of its two hour and fifty-minute length, what I kept thinking was work, training, and teaching. It’s not until that last hour that we see any onstage before-an-audience performances at all. Up until then, we are in rehearsal rooms, watching almost nothing but ballet masters and their students honing their craft. What may be different from the previous educational situations we’ve seen is the absolute dedication the dancers possess to their work, and work it most definitely is. Ballet is a great film of the serious effort art can require. Dance seems especially suited to understanding this because the acolytes are all relatively young and their teachers are now passing on their wisdom to this next generation, and the only way to pass it on is by demonstrating, choreographing, explaining, going over and over dances. Maybe a film about musicians could show something similar. Films about artists or writers would likely never work - the connections between the masters and those they teach aren’t the same. But ballet works really well - we see former great stars who now aren’t at their dancing prime working with current stars utilizing a striking variety of teaching styles. It’s another Wiseman film where repetition matters a lot in good ways, seeing how many different approaches ballet masters can employ to teach their dancers.
I didn’t count, but that first over half of the film must have something like eight or nine full run-throughs of works in progress. Every one is some variation on how to rehearse and learn a routine. They are in various stages of progress, and it’s clear that another kind of repetition is that every dance has to be gone over and then over again. Some of them end on that line, some version of “let’s do it again”. My favorite one of these is with another version of a Wiseman celebrity, someone famous within the world of the film like Deborah Meier was in the last one. She’s only called Agnes here, but it’s Agnes de Mille, most known for choreographing the dance numbers in the Broadway shows Oklahoma!, Carousel and Brigadoon, but also big in the world of ballet. She died very soon after the filming, at the age of 88. Here she’s seen in a wheelchair with an assistant who sees that her instructions are followed, but she’s incredibly vibrant when we see her working and quite cogent in an interview scene later in the film. She’s seen working out a dance for a single ballerina, giving a series of instructions, suggestions, and small changes, as the dance comes to look quite polished and beautiful. When the number concludes, we likely think her work is done, but her Abrupt End of Scene Line is “That's it. Now slower." It’s just assumed that working on a routine means doing it over again, even when it already looks great.
Sometimes we see the same dance done over more than once, another variation between the scenes. Other variations, besides the styles of the ballet masters, are the number of dancers involved, from a roomful of them to single teacher-dancer sessions. Nobody is ever completely satisfied. Nothing we see is ever considered complete. What’s remarkably consistent from rehearsal to rehearsal is that unless I missed something, they are all long single takes without cuts, although the positions of the camera may change. One discovery of this film is how suited a direct cinema camera style is to recording dance. The combination of being in these rehearsal rooms seeing things worked out and the sense of the camera becoming part of the movement works extremely well. One could easily prefer these to the finished versions in front of audiences. Since these are all filmed with a single camera, any cut would mean that either something is missing or a bit has been left out, so it becomes a choreography of its own to see the camera navigate positions to film the dance, as these positions also vary considerably from one session to the next. There’s an amazing sequence where a black male ballet master (we never get his name, as usual) is working with a group of dancers, and the whole thing is about a four-minute single take. The teacher is a great dancer himself, and the camera is in just the right spot to see him doing movements the group has clearly worked on a lot, while behind him they echo his complicated steps very closely. He sings out little encouragements throughout, and the camera moves from the dancers to him and back, sometimes across the room, so there’s movement on the fly between the teacher, the dancers, and the camera. It’s also so beautifully done, especially for it just happening extemporaneously. It feels like the dancers are giving life to the ideas of the choreographer, and the way this guy does it, dancing a dance around them and calling out encouragement, is really exciting to see.
This is one of the times then to notice how great Wiseman’s regular cinematographer John Davey is. Giving fluent and imaginative life to extemporaneous movement must be so much harder than it looks. It’s funny too that these rehearsal rooms are usually mirrored on one side, and Davey is occasionally visible quite briefly, as he maneuvers himself in relation to the dancers while also having to stay out of his own reflection. Also notable is that when the same dance is repeated, it’s filmed differently. There’s one sequence where the British choreographer works with three ballerinas, and we first see the camera move back and forth repeatedly between him and the ballerinas as he keeps giving them directions. After one complete dance of again about four minutes, we might think we’re done, but instead the dance is repeated, this time with the camera absolutely still and on the ballerinas alone. The two dances with some additional direction by the choreographer in between is all done in a single take. The difference between the two dances is striking, as if the first was the plane getting ready to take off and the second was well in the air.
I’ll just give one more example of these long takes and differing teaching styles, with yet another ballet master who was a former great dancer herself, seen here working with one of ABT’s principal ballerinas. They don’t give names here either, but the teacher is Irina Kolpakova and the ballerina is Susan Jaffe. Kolpakova was the principal ballerina in Kirov, and for a few years was a choreographer here. Jaffe was a major ABT star for over twenty years, and worked with everyone from Balanchine and De Mille to Jerome Robbins and Twyla Tharp. The sequence of these two working together is extraordinary, a single take of nearly ten minutes, where Jaffe does the same dance three times, with Kolpakova demonstrating how it’s done at length between the first and second versions. This is another one where we see them both at times making the same movements, as Jaffe learns a very complicated routine. As Kolpakova tells her: “It’s very difficult, but it’s higher level” - an excellent Wiseman line. She also asserts in her Russian-accented delivery to Jaffe the importance of eye position: “When you watch the movie star, sometimes it’s not where they are, sometimes only eyes,” meaning, I think, the quite sophisticated notion that the dancer can look somewhere without having to move to that point. It’s a cerebral argument that Jaffe seems to absorb - a different way of teaching once again captured in an exhilarating sequence without a cut during the entire three versions of the dance. That it’s filmed this way is as brilliant as what their camera captures.
While as I’ve said the largest amount of this more than half part of the film is devoted to these rehearsal sequences, Wiseman also squeezes in just a bit of recognizable institutional activity, but it’s really surprising how little diversion there is from this basic work between ballet masters and these dancers. We do see some phone call monologs of Jane Hermann, the director of ABT (we missed Baryshnikov by about five years, as he had this job until 1989). She’s only identified by first name, but her calls are all about how much it costs to perform a week’s worth of ballet somewhere (quite a lot) as she negotiates tour arrangements. Her most amazing call is a long burst of anger about a serious scheduling screwup, where the Kirov Ballet has been booked to immediately follow the ABT into the same space, “sold down the river” she says. She pounds her desk while yelling at the person responsible, since the effect of this could cost them millions of dollars. “If you wanted to put a knife in me you couldn’t have done much better.” It goes on in that vein at some length - it resides high on my list of great phone monolog “performances” in Wiseman films. But she’s our only glimpse at the financial side of this operation, where Wiseman probably filmed hours of what must be meetings about salaries, fundraising, advertising, and all that sort of thing. Why show that when there’s great ballet being made just down the hall in one of these rehearsal rooms? So much better to head over there. One additional and inevitable bit, though, are three sequences of prospective dancers wanting to join the company who present themselves to the guy who gives them the news of success and failure, and the scenes can’t help but remind us of the guy who had the same job in “Model”. Here, we actually see someone offered a contract, though there’s also one of those “I feel we cannot use you” interviews as well. The business and interview meetings are only a small part of Ballet. The real business is seeing dancers and their teachers in all their varieties.
When the last hour gets going - performances by the troupe in Athens and Copenhagen, I had expected this to be an all-performance section. The performances we do see are stunning, but much more is packed into this part than I had recalled. One difference with performances, as the final credits show, is that they are often shot with two cameras, so some cutting is allowed and also changes of distance. Even so, the style generally is long takes and minimal camera movement, mainly just to follow the dancers. And in our by now expected Wiseman fashion, we get whole numbers without interruption and without cutting away to peripheral activities while performances are in progress. Sometimes the camera looks astonishingly close, as if it’s onstage during the performance, and I don’t think this can be faked with a telephoto lens. We also get a good amount of “Behind the Scenes” here, one part being camera angles which show dancers and stagehands watching the performance - it feels more like a community enterprise than a few onstage performers, as stunning and now polished as those performers are. We do see the results of all that hard work which the film showed us before we hit the road. We also get fair amounts of preparation before shows - calls of “10 minutes” or “half hour” leading to a flurry of makeup, costume, and hair adjustments, along with needed work on ballet slippers. And a doctor who had one scene in New York goes with them on tour too, to deal with the multitude of injuries and pains that are also part of a dancer’s life.
Surprising in this last hour is that not everything is devoted to onstage performance. Maybe like the professionals in other remote places, Canal Zone or Sinai Field Mission say, we get serious attention to their recreational activities, a subject Wiseman just seems regularly interested in - what “workers” do to amuse themselves. He seems to especially like showing new pursuits that haven’t come up before in his films, as if taken together, one thing we get a good idea of is the large variety of things people do to relax and have fun. In Greece, there’s a nice and fairly lengthy nightclub/restaurant scene, where it’s enjoyable to see professional dancers now on a dance floor just for kicks. They also go to the beach, play a little paddleball in the ocean (the camera’s in the water too, ever participatory and direct), and the whole Greek section starts with some kite flying, before we even get to the venue. In Copenhagen, the surprising sequence is a big visit to Tivoli Gardens, the amusement park that’s been going since the 19th century. It almost feels like Wiseman has been looking for any pretext to get to a place like this. It’s like, here we are at Tivoli, let’s give it a real look, let’s not miss the opportunity, even though we’re in a film about ballet. The camera is with them on a roller coaster, and again when they go for a ride on some swinging cars. Wiseman gets really caught up in the mechanics of the cars - the sense of curiosity that if he sees something interesting he’s going to give it a look is always present. When they go on a ride featuring circling little bird cars, one of the dancers rightly compares them to the dying swans of their ballet, and one arcade game they play involves a race of wooden horses, no doubt reminding us of Racetrack, so associations and connections are happening all the time. No matter where we are, things will get included in these films that link to larger structures, either references to other stuff we’ve seen here or in other movies of his, even if the references seem mainly playful.
We’ve got more performance films to come, so it feels like we’re just getting started. This is a good beginning, especially in now seeing that major Wiseman interests are getting large attention: work, training, and all that. And I’m happy now that we’ve already been looking at some performance aspects of all his films, so this direction doesn’t feel like it’s popped up out of nowhere.