>>PREVIEW
BALLET RUSSES
DIRECTED BY Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller
Ballet Russes is a documentary film tracing the history of the ballet company that started them all. The original Russes began in 1909 and ran until 1962, and is considered to be the originator of modern ballet. The company disintegrated, reformed, split in two, and then spawned others across the world. Many of the dancers were ex-pats from Russia who fled after the revolution, and were innovators of 20th century dance.
Eventually, George Ballenchine and Leonide Massine, the premier choreographers of the day, sought to reinvigorate ballet in Western Europe, and saw in these young girls their opportunity. Add to that the talent of others like Matisse, Stravinsky and Dali and you had one of the most exciting periods in dance history.
The film follows the company as it goes on the road to America, where rivalries and pursuits of grandeur make for some great art, but also pave the road to ruin. Many of the dancers must have been great personalities, and some of the interviews glean bits and pieces of juicy information. The impression is made that the life of the ex-ballet dancer isn’t always one of pater familias, passing their experience down to the next group of hopefuls. If the filmmakers were honest, they’d explore those hints of faded glory and garish makeup. Unfortunately, the pedestrian approach to the film’s makes for a series of vignettes of elderly people looking oblivious to their pasty presence in stuffed tutus.
It’s a curiously unaffecting film despite the fact that many of the dancers are over 80 and still able to lucidly describe their memories and old trysts. The filmmakers were both fortunate and cursed to have so much footage of the actual productions of the ballets – the dancing still looks beautiful, in an old-timey zoetrope kind of way, but when combining that with the dry history of the company’s tentacles moving across the world, you see that beauty truly is fleeting, especially when excommunicated from celluloid.
Ballet is a difficult, beautiful art, even if most people only want to see The Nutcracker (and probably barely make it through that anyway). Ballets Russes isn’t about ballet, and it isn’t much of a historiography either. Sadly, tracing the history of a group of people compelled to pursue it isn’t nearly as interesting as seeing the real thing first, or secondhand. |
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