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Introduction: Ballet in Tin Cans
- Rutgers University Press
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1 Introduction Ballet in Tin Cans I have never yet given a lecture on ballet, especially in the provinces, when someone has not asked me if the films could not make an important contribution to ballet. It is a natural question since there is more demand than supply, and ballet in tin cans could reach the smallest village. . . . This is not a question that can be answered very easily. —Arnold Haskell, 1951 Ballet stands like a colossus bestriding the world of dance. —Wendy Buonaventura, 2003 [I]n general, people don’t know about ballet from seeing it. . . . People know about ballet from the movies. —Joan Acocella, 2004 The 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon stars Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse as professional dancers named Tony Hunter and Gabrielle Gerard. He is an aging hoofer, she a young ballerina, and it has been decided that they must dance together, perform together, in a new Broadway show. The idea is mutually terrifying: each thinks the other the more brilliant, the greater artist ; each thinks the other opposed to the partnership; each believes that they will look ridiculous together. He is afraid that at the very least she is much too tall for him. So when they meet for the first time, at a cocktail party, he covertly examines her feet and says, “Pretty shoes—do you always wear high heels?” To which she responds, “No, not always. Sometimes toe shoes.” He mutters under his breath and changes the subject. I am a big fan of The Band Wagon as a classical Hollywood musical, as a Fred Astaire film, or as part of the oeuvre of auteur-director Vincente Minnelli , but this scene has always made me cringe. Partly it is just because I 2 DY ING SWA NS A ND M A DMEN know something about ballet, was trained extensively in it as a young adult, know what can plausibly be attributed to it or claimed about it and what cannot. No less than anyone else who happens to possess knowledge of an arcane or specialized subject, I have to bracket out my “real-life” experiences to accept Hollywood’s conventionalized versions of them. At the same time, I am sure that The Band Wagon does not really mean us to believe that female ballet dancers spend their entire lives with their feet encased only in toe shoes or stiletto heels. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the film’s writers , doubtless intended simply to play up the height situation and to wring an easy laugh out of an absurd image, a common enough ploy in a genre as defined by fantasy as was the musical film. But given Cyd Charisse’s own background and training in classical ballet—the field in which she began her performing career—one wonders what she thought about the line or of the even more egregious or bizarre claims made about ballet and, most particularly, ballet dancers in the numerous other Hollywood films in which she appeared. In fact, The Band Wagon is otherwise relatively well informed on the subject of dance and dancers, and by the mid-1950s “the world of the ballet” had become a rich source of subject matter for commercial cinema. Anyone who pays attention to movie box-office trends now probably has noted the number of films appearing in the twenty-first century that feature budding or professional ballet dancers as protagonists, among them Center Stage (2000), Billy Elliot (2000), Save the Last Dance (2001), The Company (2003), and Step Up (2006). And anyone who studies the history of popular cinema, whether of Hollywood or its overseas equivalents, likely could, if pressed, also come up with the names of other commercially or critically successful films in which ballet and ballet dancers have played some key role in the plot. The tragic heroines of films from Grand Hotel (1932) to Waterloo Bridge (190) to The Red Shoes (198) were ballerinas, and several might remember, and even admit to, The Turning Point (1977), Fame (1980), or Flashdance (1983) as more or less guilty pleasures from their youth. Partisans of the film musical are familiar not only with The Band Wagon, of course, but also with the big ballets in Hollywood musicals from the 1930s on, or the ballet set pieces typically included in film adaptations of operas and operettas; revues frequently featured “toe dance” numbers too. Even May McAvoy wore a tutu and toe shoes in the first feature film...