The Dancer

There are so many little niches in our society as a whole. Its just filled with microcosms that for the people involved in them are their whole world. One such niche is the world of professional Ballet dancing.

Many little girls take Ballet lessons when they are kids, its fun for them and its very feminine. Thank God most of those girl don't go after it as a career, not only does it take a very specific body type like with Football, or Boxing, but it also destroys the body. The girl that the documentary follows is named Katja Bjorner. She describes the pain she is always in, as she warms up and talks to the documentarian she mentions that her leg and foot were hurting her that day and that she has just learned to ignore it. The reason for the pain is that she, as well as other Ballet dancers are doing something unnatural. The human body is not made to do this sort of thing. The film makes us watch as her as well as other dancers bend and mould their bodies into doing what they need them to do.

They bend and mold their bodies in the same way that their shoes are made. A very cool section of the film shows how their shoes are made, how quickly the shoe makers work, since they have to be made by hand and tailor fitted to each separate girls foot they cant just make one size fits all. So much of a Ballet dancers movements are based on the feet having to be able to do something incredibly specific with weight distribution and balance that if there's something wrong with the shoes they cant do what they need to do.

One of the teachers explains the difference between a dancer and a ballerina, and that they are the same, but the Ballerina has to be perfect. She continues to say that nothing is perfect, but the Ballerina has to be. That is quite a load to bear as a dancer. Perfection is the key to success, but as you turn your body into a dancers and break your self down and rebuild there has to be weakness' that form and cracks.

Ballet is made up of a few components, to my understanding of the way it works is that its a merging of the geometry of the human body, the lines we have and the way we move combined with the math of the music that each different dance is made for. Making the body into an instrument of the music, to me it seems the purest form of dance of trying to make the human body into the music would be Ballet.

Watching the dancers is like watching a Degas come to life, at one point towards the beginning of the film there is a wide shot of Katja and one of her teachers dancing in unison and it was so beautiful, it was beyond what I could describe, you have to see it. Most of the film when she isn't talking about dancing we are simply watching her warm up, train and perform, sometimes alone, sometimes with other dancers and teachers. That might sound boring, but it really was breathtaking. Its been a few years since Ive been to the Ballet, and when I did see it I was in the nosebleed section, but even from there I could see the women and their movements and it was something else.

A complaint I would have, and its not really their fault necessarily is that sometimes they were shooting on film and other times on video tape making a strange mix. Years of simply existing degrade tape, so certain sections you could tell the color was a little off, or there was some interference, minimal at best. These are things that upon reflection I thought about, but didn't really notice during the actual viewing. Almost no one would realize this without the proper education on it.

There are so many stupid dance movies that have come out in the last few years, here is one about the real thing. It might be slow, and there might not be a "story" but it was just beautiful to watch and I really enjoyed it. Seeing the human body in that way is about as close to perfect as I guess we can get. 8/10 stars.

Director: Donya Feuer