Word: balletic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pine needles and grows to be 30 feet tall before your eyes is magic, a window onto another world. That tree guarded the world of The Nutcracker, and in my fifth Christmas season, my parent gave me a passport into this land--a ticket to New York's Metropolitan ballet company production of the classic. For five years I returned, savoring every step of the experience from the glint of the gilded chandeliers to the hush of a carpet against Mary-Janed feet...
...write it down. "They can skate." Boy, it's a good thing, because otherwise, they might be forced to tap dance or do ballet...
...open question as to whether it is this bastardization of human dialogue or the ridiculous manner in which the characters speak their lines which makes watching Dancers more painful than twirling in a pair of toe shoes. Suffice it to say, ballet dancers are taught to speak with their bodies rather than their mouths for good reason...
Even more absurd than this plot line is Ross' insistence on pummeling his audience with the parallels of the ballet Giselle with this film of Giselle. Shots of Giselle's grave in the staged ballet are interspersed with fuzzy-lensed shots of Lisa looking sickly angelic. And since Dancers is a film of the filming of Giselle, Ross attempts Bergman-like self-referentiality--with shots of cameras and film crews, lenses and light meters--but only succeeds in overstating his own inadequacy as a film director...
...light. Especially well-executed are a scene of the dancers eating pasta in the Italian countryside as well a sequence in which Tony dances alone bathed in five o'clock sunlight. Why, however, such flawless cinematography was not employed during the 20-minute-long sequence of the actual staged ballet remains a mystery. Nevertheless, the audience is thankful for the respite from cliched and silly dialogue that this 20 minutes provides...