La Danse

This is a new documentary by Frederick Wiseman. He filmed the Paris Opera Ballet from top to bottom in a fascinating movie that includes a lot of footage of dancers working together and with choreographers, as well as backstage activity such as sewing costumes, dying shoes, keeping bees and arranging fund raising events. The movie doesn't have any descriptive commentary or titling and there is no single person talk-to-the-camera footage either, so you really feel like a fly on the wall watching this amazing organization go through its paces. I was most fascinated by the process that the dancers go through to learn their parts. With the many modern pieces that are shown, the choreographers are there in the studio, tweaking the smallest movements, describing 'motivations', adjusting as they go. In one scene, a couple does something that interests the choreographer who asks them to do it again, however they didn't notice what they were doing so have trouble recreating something that just happened. As I watched this process, I realized that these dancers are taking their exceptional bodies and creating a vocabulary, expressing emotions, ideas, in a way that most of us normal people could never do. We are like toddlers just learning to speak compared with the beauty they can express with the smallest, precise moments.

There is a lot of humour sprinkled throughout this movie. In one sequence, we hear a running commentary as the troupe runs through a rehearsal on stage. When one dancer comes out in her tutu but with leg warmers pulled up over her thighs, someone watching asks why she's wearing thermal underwear.

This movie does more than other ballet movies that I've seen to reveal the collaborative work that dance really is. Sure there are superstars and their individual talents attract audiences, but dance is created by a lot of people, from the stars to the corps members to the people working on costumes and lighting and keeping the facility clean, to the administrators who keep everything humming.

Wiseman includes a lot of footage of Paris street scenes, the vaults and tunnels under the Opera Garnier and empty hallways, which sometimes felt like taking time away from the dancers, however the overall feeling from this movie is of the amazing, difficult, beautiful work of creating dance.