difficult dances
by Douglas Messerli
Barbara
Turner (screenplay, based on a story by Turner and Neve Campbell), Robert
Altman (director) The Company / 2003
Roger
Ebert describes Robert Altman’s penultimate film, The Company as, strangely enough, an autobiographical film—even
though when the director was first presented with the script by former dance
Barbara Turner, he responded, "Barbara, I read your script and I don't get
it. I don't understand. I don't know what it is. I'm just the wrong guy for
this."
Although Campbell (playing a character
named Loretta 'Ry' Ryan) falls in love with the seemingly perfect young man, a
young chef, played by James Franco, she fails to show up on time for his lovely
late-night meal. How she possibly maintains her daytime dancing career and her
night-time activities is not entirely explained.
Even more importantly, dancers, unlike
the Hollywood actors with whom Altman works, live in a fragile world not unlike
beloved race horses: at any moment the strenuous imposition of legs, feet, and
other limbs forced to disobey the obvious laws of gravity, endanger not only
their careers by their lives.
Both the incredible popular dancers,
Michael Jackson and Prince, one must remember, suffered so much pain that they
sought relief in opioids and other drugs. These Joffrey dancers must not only
bind their feet—a bit like the ancient Chinese women—but daily suffer pain
that, for the older major dancer of the group, often ends in broken tendons and
the end of their career. It is important to remember, also, that Joffrey’s own
life ended in AIDS, a fact that the
Arpino
character, Joffrey’s real-life companion, memorializes in his comments on the
AIDS- related deaths
of several of his greatest male dancers. Far more than great sports figures,
dancers generally have, for many reasons, extremely short careers. Great
dancers are basically lean young men and women who can accomplish incredible
acts of bodily movement for a few years at most. Ten years, as one dancer
indirectly argues, is a long time to perform with the company, even if her
interpretations are longer respected.
And, finally, if Joffrey and Arpino were
not tyrants in the way that Diaghilev was to Nijinksy and the rest of his corps,
Mr. A. can certainly be a difficult and dismissive man, castigating his dancers,
whom he perceives as rebellious children, at the very moment he praises them in
a way that they cannot know whether he is serious or not. And guest
choreographers, such as Robert Desrosiers can dismiss central dancers,
endangering their careers and certainly deflating their egos, with a flick of
his wrist.
On top of that, Altman seems genuinely
interested in actually showing ballet. Unlike so many contemporary directors who
seem to think dance is something better left to the camera, Altman moves his
camera back, time and again, to let us actually see the performers in full
perspective. Yes, at moments, just as HD Met Opera, he pushes in to see the
expression of his performers (Joffrey was an advocate of that very expressive
quality in his dancing, “pretty” dancing “by the beat” being his self-declared
enemy), but Altman generally moves out to let us actually encounter the entire
performances of great works such as Alwin Nikolais’s Tensile Involvement, the film’s opening piece, Arpino’s Light Rain, Suite Saint-Saëns and Trinity, Moses Pendleton’s White Widow, Lar Lubovitch’s My Funny Valentine (performed in an open
Chicago park during a sudden rainstorm), and even Desrosiers’s somewhat
ridiculous dance drama The Blue Snake.
Although some dance critics did not perceive Altman’s mastery, anyone who truly
loves dance will want to see this film. And I’d argue that it represents some
of the most fortuitous filming of dance history of any film ever made.
Los Angeles, July
4, 2016
As I’ve written
in an earlier My
Year volume, I studied at the Joffrey
Ballet Company in New York for several months in 1969. Every night I would
attend classes that lasted for at least one or two hours at the barre. I knew,
even though in those days I was lean and athletic, that I was probably never
going to become a dancer, but after several weeks I was encouraged by one instructor
when I did a perfect in-line brisé. I, myself, was amazed at my accomplishment.
Yet given my equally lean salary from Columbia University, I could no longer
afford my lessons, and realizing that I did not truly have a dancer’s body, I soon
after left my daily regimen.
It must have been in that period in New
York City when I first attended a performance of the company. I can no longer
remember the date, but it can’t have been as early as 1967 when the Joffrey
first revived Kurt Jooss’s The Green Table, but
I remember that evening as including both that performance and Agnes De Mille’s
Rodeo. It certainly made me want to dance.
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