Widget Image

Red Shoes/Black Swan: Ballet and the Loss of the Soul

It must be one of the ironies of the gods that one of the world’s most beautiful art forms is also the most destructive of its practitioners. Ballet is the monster that eats its young. Two movies explore the cost of making art with one’s body, and ultimately, one’s soul. Black Swan details what happens when a fragile mind breaks under the pressure of becoming a great ballerina, and The Red Shoes shows the personal cost one pays when one is utterly consumed by the desire to dance.

Though painters and musicians often seem to pay for the gift of their creativity with instability in their material and psychological lives, ballet dancers may work the hardest and sacrifice the most for the least amount of gain. As physically demanding as any Olympic sport, and possibly worse because of the regularity with which dancers must perform in pain, dance has the shortest creative lifespan in the arts. It is an all-consuming art and only the absolute best get to make a career of it for the brief portion of time that is allotted. Dancers start studying as preteens, and their careers rarely last past the age of thirty. The time it takes to perfect their craft leaves little or no time for anything else, like education, relationships, or a life outside the studio.

In both Black Swan and The Red Shoes, the ballerinas dance themselves to death. Instead of suicide by cop, it’s death by satin slippers.

It also requires commitment, determination, and self-discipline beyond the ken of ordinary people. Not every person can deal with the pressure. Some bodies break under the physical strain; some minds falter under the burden.

Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky (2010), depicts the brief apex of the career of Nina, a principal dancer with a ballet company modeled on New York’s American Ballet Theater. When the career of lead dancer Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) ends – age and alcohol? – Nina is considered for the dual role of Odette/Odile in a production of the ballet Swan Lake. Odette, the white swan, must demonstrate purity, grace, and innocence. The black swan, Odile, however, requires sensuality and seductiveness. Though she is technically excellent, the head of the company is not sure that Nina can handle the free spirited and dark allure of the black swan half of the role. Worse, a new dancer, played by earthy/scuzzy Mila Kunis, seems perfect for the part.

Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes presents the conflicts between the head of a ballet company and the young composer who marries the lead dancer of that company, taking her away from the dance. It mirrors a real-life scandal between 1920’s Ballets Russe impresario Diaghilev and dancer Nijinsky, who eloped with the prima ballerina; Nijinsky and his wife were both fired. In one of those weird patterns that occur in life and art where art and life keep imitating each other, the plot also presages the conflict between later New York City Ballet head guru (dictator) George Balanchine and his principal dancer, Suzanne Farrell. She blew off Balanchine’s advances and dared marry a fellow dancer. Balanchine retaliated by sacking her and trying his best to destroy the couple’s careers.

In both Black Swan and The Red Shoes, the ballerinas dance themselves to death. Instead of suicide by cop, it’s death by satin slippers. Both films allude to the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, in which a little girl, enthralled by her beautiful, bewitched, sinister red dancing shoes, dances herself to ruin. The ballet-within-the-film in The Red Shoes is that fairy tale; in Black Swan, it’s Swan Lake.

In Hans Anderson’s fairy tale, the girl cannot stop dancing until her feet are chopped off, and she is given wooden feet and crutches. She dies at the end. In the films, Winona Ryder’s character gets hit by a car and breaks her legs; The Red Shoes’ Victoria pitches herself off a balcony onto train tracks; and Portman’s Nina stabs herself under the delusion that she has stabbed her rival/dark-half Kunis.

Ballet is a sport of princesses. The Red Shoes’ Victoria (played by Moira Shearer) is an upper crust aristocrat; Natalie Portman’s Nina has been raised on ballet by her retired-dancer single mother, complete with fluffy pink “Angelina Ballerina” bedroom décor.

The Red Shoes’ Victoria tries the domestic life, but she yearns to dance. She can’t dance and have a life, and she just can’t live without dancing. Life is empty without dance. Nina, one senses, has never been anywhere that didn’t have something to do with ballet. She’s a child in a highly honed body.

What happens when you take a child’s mind, an undeveloped personality, and subject it to the diamond-producing pressure of competition for a major ballet role?

In one scene, in an act of rebellion against her mother’s control, Nina throws out all her stuffed animals. That she still has all those stuffed animals to throw out tells you everything you need to know about Nina’s life. Unfortunately, it is the reaction of a defiant child, rather than the assumption of adulthood. It does not make her better equipped to deal with her very adult job.

The Red Shoes is one of the brightest Technicolor films ever made, swirling with rich hues to match the heightened drama of the creative conflicts in the story. Black Swan, in contrast, is black and white and urban greys all over, to reflect the psyche of its lead ballerina, who lives life in one color: dance. Even her pink child’s bedroom (it looks like it hasn’t changed since she took her first dance class in elementary school) is muted – after all, she’s only there to sleep.

Gelsey Kirkland, one of the best ballerinas of her era, described the intense pressure of life on toe shoes in her autobiography, Dancing on My Grave (Doubleday, 1986). In it she details how the stress to perform, to get the best roles, led her to drugs and anorexia. In a creepy attempt to imitate Balanchine’s golden girl, Suzanne Farrell, she cut off her lower eyelashes and injected her lips with silicon. In Black Swan, Natalie Portman steals former lead Winona Ryder’s lipstick, as if wearing it would elevate her dance to the same level as the former star’s. Considering that Winona Ryder’s character is also doomed- she walks into traffic when she loses her place in the dance company – this attempt at magical emulation foreshadows Nina’s own derailment. Kirkland’s book also details the starvation, bulimia, and drug use pervasive in the ballet world. Black Swan suggests that Portman’s meager meals and her one experience with Ecstasy help to unravel her fragile psychological balance.

Black Swan delves into Nina’s psychological deterioration as a counterpart of the duality of the Odette/Odile role. Nina wants to be perfect. She cannot let go and surrender into the flow of the dance, though she dreams of this liberation. In the sequence in which Nina visualizes herself releasing into the role of the black swan, she sprouts first feathers and then wings. It is a powerful moment, and one of the most beautiful in the film.

Both films are full of beautiful images. Dance and photography have a synergistic relationship. The long lines and peak movements of dance are accentuated and highlighted by the camera lens. It is hard to photograph a painting. It is easy to film a dance, and shoot it in such a way that all the highest moves are heightened.

Neither film even attempts to deconstruct why dance is the devouring demon of the arts. It is assumed. Perhaps it is the nature of the beast: this is the art form which pushes its artists to the far limits of their physical capabilities. Where bodies go, minds must follow, even if it is to the edge of a precipice.

Portman does a good job of portraying the breakable woman-child Nina, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the part. Her breakdown is entirely believable, and it is a credit to her acting skill that it takes a while for the audience to figure out exactly what is real and what is not. The Red Shoes’ Moira Shearer, in the role of her career, plays her woman-child character simply; after all, there is not much to dancers aside from the dance. She wants to dance, and she wants to dance, and she wants to dance. There is no life for her beyond the ballet barre. She knows this, because she tried, and failed, to live without dancing.

Nina’s last words are “I was perfect.” There is no such thing as perfection in any human endeavor. Those who strive for perfection are bedeviled by racking insecurity – only a self-doubting person strives for perfection. The rest of us mere mortals shrug off our shortcomings and live life. Fairy tale princesses, however, hold themselves to a higher standard.

Sometimes it destroys them.

Share Post
Written by

Amy Anna was raised by wolves. She spends all her time eating and watching movies while lying on the couch . Her animal totem is the velociraptor.

No comments

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.