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Review: Ballerina

A baby-steps ballet documentary

By JEFFREY GANTZ | April 28, 2009

2.0 Stars

VIDEO: The trailer for Ballerina

The subject of Bertrand Normand's 2006 French-television documentary is actually five ballerinas from the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg (better known here as the Kirov Ballet, but now looking to revert to its original name): Uliana Lopatkina, Evgenia Obraztsova, Alina Somova, Diana Vishneva, and Svetlana Zakharova.

Diane Baker, a treat way back in Marnie, supplies the English-version voice-over narration, where clichés compete with platitudes (while some names get butchered), and the dancers themselves aren't much more revealing in their brief interviews.

You do appreciate how hard these women work every day, and the sacrifice their calling demands, and there are a few precious extended clips, notably Lopatkina in Balanchine's Diamonds and Obraztsova in Romeo and Juliet. But this is a baby-steps ballet doc, especially next to Ballets Russes, which spends its entire two hours proudly on pointe.

Related: Documentary Man, Scenes from the city, Not quite Nina, More

Documentary Man
If you think the polemic salvos Michael Moore churns out define the modern documentary, you've either succumbed to Moore's manipulative shenanigans or are unfamiliar with the works of Frederick Wiseman. No disrespect to the Roger & Me director, he is what he is — a man with a camera and a handful of pixie dust.
Scenes from the city
I missed more things in two and a half days last week than I managed to take in, so whatever I might infer about dance in the New York vortex could have come out a different way if I’d reversed my priorities.
Not quite Nina
On hearing the opening notes of the Kronos Quartet composition and seeing the dancers lit in sunny yellow, I feared we were about to be subjected to one of those “up with people” ballets.
Tragic tropes and anti-tropes
The only question to ask about a new Romeo and Juliet, besides “Why?”, is “Why New York City Ballet?”
Love and death
“Classic Balanchine” as opposed to . . . “Jazz Balanchine”? “Porno Balanchine”? What was the alternative?
Dreaming and remembrance
Two momentous revivals in town showed us how big the category of classical ballet really is.
Links to a legacy
In her Pillow Talk at Jacob’s Pillow last weekend, Suzanne Farrell was asked what she expects of the young dancers who are reviving George Balanchine’s ballets under her direction.
State of the art
Maybe it’s the economy, but Boston Ballet’s third-annual season-opening gala was a sober evening, without the orchestral overture that graced the first two affairs.
Smaller is better
Next fall, Boston Ballet will move all its performing operations to the Opera House from Citi Performing Arts Center's immense and unfriendly Wang Theatre.
Not so great
Way back in 1977, PBS gave us a Nutcracker with a difference: Mikhail Baryshnikov as an electrifying Nutcracker/Cavalier and willowy Gelsey Kirkland as an older-than-usual Clara, as the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Adam and Eve
A day at New York City Ballet that starts with a matinee of Coppélia and ends with a Balanchine evening might seem to offer merely the contrast between classic and modern, old and new.
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