Cinematically Inclined: “The Turning Point”

If there’s one thing I learned from Black Swan, it’s that ballerinas are batshit crazy. One friend called it “Ballerina Fight Club”. From other films with ballet or dance, I learn only about some nondescript aspiring young Midwest girl hoping to learn about life and love and the big city. The dancing, in all of the stories, appears secondary to the life journey the often milquetoast, heterosexual white female undertakes to find herself, or some such nonsense. (See further: Center Stage, The Company.)

This is what makes Herbert Ross’s 1977 film The Turning Point unique in its day and even today, at least in the small canon of dance films. This is a film centering on two women who started off as aspiring ballerinas in the 1950s and took radically different paths in life. Emma (the late, great Anne Bancroft) became the prima ballerina of the premiere American ballet theatre company. Dee Dee (Shirley MacLaine) became pregnant, gave up a promising career and settled into a low-key life running a dance school with her former partner Wayne (Tom Skerritt) in Oklahoma. Twenty years later, the company plays two nights in their small town and Dee Dee is reunited with her former colleagues, including her best friend and formidable foe Emma. The “turning point” refers not just to the pregnancy, but also the lead role in Anna Karenina, which was awarded to Emma when Dee Dee had a baby, and became a career-defining role.

That baby, Emilia (Leslie Browne), has become a promising ballerina. The dance company offers her a summer scholarship in Manhattan, and Dee Dee accompanies her, surrounding herself with her past and the career that she left behind, which now awaits her daughter. In the background, a young Russian dancer (Mikhail Baryshnikov, in the role that made him an actor) romances Emilia. Into this turmoil there are rumours of the dance company suffering financially, a young prick of a director trying to make ballet cold and hip, and an old flame from Dee Dee’s past, amongst others.

There’s enough drama here to fuel an entire soap opera. In fact, the content of The Turning Point could easily have been the catalyst for a show like NBC’s Smash, and an heir apparent to Fame (which, by the way, was released just a couple of years after the success of The Turning Point and became a cultural touchstone in its own right). Playwright Arthur Laurents crams his screenplay not with clichés, but with several plot threads giving the film an aura of really living in the dance world. There’s constant worry about funding an art form that has considerable support in Europe but not in America, where it is considered an elitist pastime and not as part of one’s essential cultural education. The ballet is not just a backdrop into which a navel-gazing treatise a la Eat, Pray, Love is thrown to give some young starlet an acting showcase. This is a film that honours the dance tradition and is about people who eat, breathe, sleep and love the ballet, without irony and purely for the love of it. Their bodies may ache, their feet will bluster and their will beaten (and sometimes broken) under vicious taskmasters, but all of the assembled members of the company believe in their craft, using it to create art.

Master Class: Maya Plisetskaya’s “Bolero”

The term “masterpiece” gets thrown around far too often these days. While I have seen it applied to cuisine, architecture and two-dimensional visual art, it’s not just a static finished product, but a performance, a live event that is best seen in motion.

With the grand re-opening of Moscow’s hallowed Bolshoi Theater this week, one cannot help but think of the most well-known ballets danced on the stage, including Swan Lake, Spartacus and The Nutcracker, all of which have roots in Russia. The theatre, however, produced no greater star in the twentieth century than Maya Plisetskaya.

Born in 1925 and still alive today, Plisetskaya faced a number of obstacles on her way to becoming one of the most seminal stars of the Bolshoi. Her father was executed during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, her mother was sent to a gulag, and she fought against anti-Semitism and the supposed limitations of her physicality – mainly that she was a fiery redhead with milky skin – to earn international acclaim and the rare honour of being named prima ballerina assoluta, a title conferred to very few dancers to this day. Retiring in 1990, Plisetskaya never slowed down as a ballerina, having danced the lead in Swan Lake as late as 1986 to considerable acclaim, at the age of 61. Maya Plisetskaya is considered the Maria Callas of the ballet world.

While there is no consensus for which of her performances ranks as the greatest, for me her finest work was the free-form, modern dance routine set to Ravel’s Bolero in 1975. At the age of 50, Plisetskaya showed she was in top form in this fifteen-minute performance, which she danced as a solo piece accompanied by 40 men onstage. Set on an elevated but unadorned white dance space against a black background, she danced the piece barefoot, her hair tied back and pulled away from her face, dressed in a simple white tank top and black trousers. The set incorporated traditional ballet points and positions but infused in a modern style. What makes the piece so compelling is that Plisetskaya may be accompanied by dozens of other dancers mirroring her movement, the first and only focus is on the prima ballerina herself. Her continual rocking and swaying at certain points, rhythmically timed to the syncopations of the orchestra, create a mesmerizing effect that demonstrated an absolute control over every nuance of her body, from the smallest toe to her fingertips, to the top of her head. One could almost imagine that her supreme mastery might have compelled her to make her hair stand on end by sheer force of will.

The point of the piece is not to recreate verisimilitude, or time and place. It’s a free-form dance piece that is meant to showcase only one thing: Maya Plisetskaya, and her God-given talents alone.

Sometimes words fail do fail even this writer, no matter how verbose I might be. Words cannot compare to the majesty and raw beauty of Plisetskaya’s finest performance. See below, and be mesmerized.

VIFF 2011: "First Position"

Director and journalist Bess Kargman was looking for inspiration for her first documentary feature. One day, while walking in Manhattan, she happened upon a dance recital. Being a former dancer herself, she went into the concert hall and was captivated by an enchanting half-Japanese, half-American dancer named Miko, who was not even ten years old, and decided to make a film about the young ballet talent competition, the Young America Grand Prix. This was the inspiration for her directorial debut, First Position, as she told us at a screening of the film at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

First Position follows a year in the lives of a half-dozen young dancers aged 11 to 17 as they prepared to participate in the Grand Prix. This contest, like American Idol does for singers, can make careers. Prizes include not only performance medals, but highly sought-after dance contracts and major scholarships from the likes of the Royal Ballet Theatre, American Ballet Theater, Royal Winnipeg Ballet and virtually all of the world’s most esteemed dance companies. Kargman was given all-access to these dancers and the competition.

We meet 11-year-old Aran, a charming young dance prodigy living on a US army base in Naples and training in Rome. His fellow competitor Gaya is a young Israeli girl whose mother is a little too intent on making them into a ballet supercouple (they are only 11 years old). Fourteen-year-old Michaela was born at the height of the Sierra Leone civil unrest, adopted by a New England Jewish couple, and now fights various bodily injuries as she takes her shot at a dance scholarship, hoping to one day open a dance academy in her war-torn home country. Sixteen-year-old Colombian Joan Sebastien is sponsored by a former ABT dancer, and carries the hopes and dreams of his family in New York City. Privileged Rebecca is the all-American girl who may have the word “princess” in stencils on her bedroom wall, but who is a studious, disciplined dancer, entering the job market at a time when companies are no longer hiring new talent. And then there’s Miko, the Palo Alto tween who has a glowing, natural stage presence and clearly lives to dance, whose mother has also pushed her adorably clumsy younger brother Jules (J.J.) into the field, hoping to raise two dance stars in her family.

Kargman’s compassionate feature marks the confident debut of a new talent. Having trained as a journalist and a dancer, she explained in the post-screening Q&A to a receptive, appreciative audience that her professional training and understanding of the inner workings of the ballet world gave her the tools to truly explore these aspiring dancers’ lives and interpret the challenges they face to her audience. Write about what you know, they say, and the same is true of directing as it is in any art form. We gain insight from intimate moments, such as Michaela’s mother dying the flesh tones in her daughter’s ballet costumes for aesthetic purposes. Why? Because ballet outfits aren’t available in African-American flesh tones. We follow Joan Sebastian to his home in Cali, Colombia, a world away from Manhattan, and realize that without his mentor’s assistance, they would never have afforded the tuition when the average salary is $250 a month in Colombia. Dance was his way out and into the world. And we see how Miko’s and J.J.’s father moved his entire company’s office closer to the best dance studio in order to give his children’s burgeoning careers flight. These little sacrifices, combined with the hours of punishing practice and debilitating injuries, show how resilient and tough the dancers are.

You will not find stories of anorexia or the artfully perverse fantasia of Black Swan here. Even the so-called stage parents and sadistic coaches are empathetic, not monsters. They simply recognize that their young charges will falter, but also can and will continue to do better. These youth live to dance simply because they are happy doing it, and can better express themselves in their physicality than they ever could in words. And that is the mark of a real visual and performance artist. Kargman has already indicated she will be doing a follow-up film in ten years’ time, to chart the development of these youth into hopefully accomplished dancers.

First Position played to rapt audiences at the Vancouver International Film Festival. You can still catch one last screening on Friday, October 14 by buying tickets here. If you miss it, don’t fret, because Kargman announced that the film was very recently granted a distribution deal in North America and will be coming soon to a theatre near you. For more information, check out the film’s active Facebook page and website.