Sex and the Single Swan

"Actually, when you dance," New York City Ballet's founding choreographer George Balanchine told interviewer Solomon Volkov, "there are no erotic impulses at all. Absolutely none!":

Dancing is so hard, it takes a lot of time and energy. When you start working, all erotic feelings disappear. . . . The stage eliminates sex. You come out onstage and fly towards her, and she reaches out to you and throws herself at you. You're so worried, you barely see her. But you have to catch her and support her. That's a difficult thing to do. It's pure technique, not sex.

Historian and former ballerina Jennifer Homans seconds Balanchine in her recent history of ballet, Apollo's Angels: "Dancers infrequently experience their art as sexual: even when their limbs are wrapped around each other or they are joined in impassioned embrace, ballet is too unreal and contrived—pure artifice—and requires too much work and technical concentration to permit arousal."

Common sense should tell us such firsthand, expert views confirm philosopher Susanne K. Langer's theory that "expression of feeling in a work of art . . . is not symptomatic at all. An artist working on a tragedy need not be in personal despair or violent upheaval; nobody, indeed, could work in such a state of mind." Yet when we fantasize, we abandon common sense, and when we fantasize about artists, we bellyflop into a mud puddle of clichés about art and personal suffering. Does our envy of great artists seduce us into exacting revenge by pretending their genius demands they sacrifice body, sanity, or even life?

Assuming a ballerina must live, love, and suffer to inhabit her roles insults the artist's greatest resource, her imagination. This pigheaded insistence that art must mirror and consume its creator's life dominates Hollywood's naïve or cynical conception of the creative mind. Ballet especially falls victim to this fallacy because its expressiveness unfolds in a twilight realm of symbol and eros, so removed from daily existence that screenwriters must explain it to us ordinary folks in simplistic biographical and pop-psychological terms. Most ballet movies, whether absorbing, like Michael Powell's The Red Shoes and Chaplin's Limelight, or clodhopping, like Herbert Ross's The Turning Point and Nicholas Hytner's Center Stage, present dancers whose success depends less on hard technical work and imaginative sensitivity to choreography and music, than on the blossoming of their own sexuality and the inspirational or corrupting influence of love and lust.

In Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky inflates this soggy myth into a hallucinatory fantasy based on stale clichés, ramped-up "artistic truths," and sheer nonsense about dancing and the ballet world. It all revolves around whether young Nina (Natalie Portman), a technically brilliant ballerina plucked to dance the double role of Odette/Odile in her company's new Swan Lake, can "let herself go" enough to master the sinister sexuality of the black swan Odile as well as the ethereal purity of the swan queen, Odette. Agonizing over whether to let go, and how, she simultaneously goes mad and triumphs onstage. Yet while Andrès Heinz, Mark Heyman, and John McLaughlin's screenplay's inanities about life, insanity, and art ignore how dance actually achieves its compelling symbolic power, Black Swan's garbage-in approach results not in garbage-out, but in a remarkably absorbing movie, thanks largely to Portman's versatile, Oscar-winning performance and Matthew Libatique's bipolar cinematography, matter-of-fact in dramatic scenes and rehearsals, wild and swirling for Portman's performances and psychological dislocations.

In Swan Lake, Aronofsky picks the perfect ballet for his Gothic-horror high style, the ludicrous story of Prince Siegfried's love for Odette. Enchanted by a sorcerer's spell, swan by day, woman by night, and betrayed by Siegfried's falling for the black swan-babe Odile, Odette must die. Through the twentieth century, Odette/Odile became ballet's Hamlet, the ballerina acid test, and the challenge of expressing the role's good-evil conflicts dramatizes the paradoxes Homans finds at ballet's core:

If anything, ballet is purifying, every movement...