home | search | poll | current columns

"Center Stage": Ballet 101 By Amanda L. Caldwell Our original thought was to have Steve review this one. Because a girl saying she liked a movie about ballet is so very duh. It doesn't give you, male or female, a really clear idea about whether or not you'll like it. Because, truth be told, I am one of those girly girls who loved bounding around in tutus and pink tights as a child. My dream to become a ballerina should have died a quick death in preschool, when the range of my gracelessness was first divined. But it was not until junior high, when I shot well beyond the standard height and width of your average principal dancer, that I finally abandoned dreams of ballet stardom for good. I still have dreams that one day I'll own my own pointe shoes. (Rather an attainable one, since all it requires is a credit card and feet.) Anyway, for me to tell you that I enjoyed watching "Center Stage," about a group of 18-year-old dance students trying to make it at the American Ballet Academy and so make it into an elite ballet company, would be dull. So let me tell you what I didn't like. The director took real, live dancers, not professional actors, to play his young characters, so the delivery of the dialogue was of the after-school-special variety. It frequently reminded me of bad novels where the author puts in strong emotion even when there is nothing to warrant it. So you get characters cursing or lamenting for no apparent reason. It was also maybe a little too simplistic in its problems and its resolutions. For instance, take the fact that ballet forces some people to be unrealistically thin -- the movie shows the natural consequences, yet nothing original. To tell you how it's simplistic in its resolutions would give away what little plot there is, so trust me. But I enjoyed it anyway. There, I said it. Overall, it kept reminding me of "The Cutting Edge": enjoyable and yet campy. (And with the same inclusion of oddly creepy sex scenes.) I don't know what kind of reviews "The Cutting Edge" got, because I wasn't married to a movie reviewer when it came out, but I imagine they couldn't have been overwhelmingly positive. And yet through college, I must have seen that video or happened upon others watching it a gazillion times (all figures approximate), because every dorm room I went in seemed to have a copy. I don't know if "Center Stage" will have quite the same popularity. Ice skating has become a sport of the masses. Not one that the masses can do -- in fact, the less massive you are, the better -- but one that people like to sit around and watch on TV. Winter Olympics spectators, even ones who have never been near an ice rink, will knowledgeably yell out such things as, "What an amazing triple axel!" or "Ooh -- did you see that bobble? That's going to cost her." Whereas ballet is still considered elite. The movie does its best to bring it down to elementary level, not making us memorize any difficult terms or sit through too much of actual classic ballets, and even livening things up with modern dance moves, simple plots (no trying to figure out what a Giselle is), and, as I said, creepy sex (ON STAGE!!). Will it be enough to entice your average fan of the sofa (as opposed to box seats)? Well, if you ever pirouetted around in tutus when you were 4, I know your answer. For the rest of you, I have only Steve's opinion to offer you. He enjoyed it (does it count as my review still if I add his comments?) because it was Ballet for Beginners. It gave him a glimpse into a world he'd never explored before. So if you're not the ballet type but wouldn't mind a little pseudo-culture, this might be just the movie for you.