I had this idea that actors should be able to do everything and I used ballet as a base for doing circus performance, tap dance, jazz, kung fu…" He trails off.
"Black Swan," which stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina whose rise to the top comes at the price of her sanity, has become something of a must-see movie for young ballerinas, not just because it is the rare Hollywood film that uses ballet as its central universe.
At points, Bourne uses ballet vocabulary itself as an anachronism.
Ms. Childs uses ballet steps as Mr. Glass uses sung numbers: as material neutral enough to emphasize pattern over content.
It is hard to think of any world- famous artist in history working as Robbins chose to: as great a celebrity as Balanchine or more so, and much wealthier, he used the dancers Balanchine had trained, he used ballet technique as Balanchine had developed it, and his ballets were performed in a repertory that was dominated by Balanchine's.
A ballet company that rarely uses ballet scores is not your everyday dance company.
Stravinsky's harsh, dissonant score; Nijinsky's convulsive, earthbound choreography; the premise of a virginal sacrifice: for an audience used to ballet as fairy tale, in a city on the brink of World War I, it's too much to handle.
Using the two ballets as a frame, the film shifts from isolation and madness to romantic wholeness.
Robbins used the codified language of ballet, as much as the vernaculars of social and folk dance, to dig down to dance's origins in daily, communicative gesture.
