La Danse

I wrote the following review of La Danse for this week's edition of The Tablet

Elected silence

La Danse:
Director: Frederick Wiseman




Frederick Wiseman’s previous subjects range wide: a mental hospital, a prison, public housing, a state legislature, a nuclear missile launch crew. His documentaries do not have narration and there are no helpful nudges from subtitles. The material is left to speak for itself and, ideally, to give the viewer a sense of the habitus of whatever subject or institution he has under scrutiny. Which doesn’t mean there is not a directorial point of view; Wiseman’s editorial take is in the way he structures his material.
This is straightforward when the subject matter has something of the commonplace about it and when the participant’s words can be cut together to support a narrative. It is self-evidently not the case with Wiseman’s latest subjects, the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. Wiseman’s cameras eavesdropped on the ballet for an entire season, following dancers from first rehearsals to final stage calls.

The Paris dancers have a distinctive élan. Their art, after all, took shape at Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles, barely ten miles away, and many think the company is without rival. But from La Danse’s opening sequence, a company ballet class, the check-in point of every dancer’s day, you get a sense of Wiseman’s difficulty. A ballet mistress calls out a sequence and the dancers execute it. Dancers mostly do as they are told; they tend not to answer back (unless they are senior in a company’s hierarchy). Theirs is an internal monologue, worried conversations with their own bodies, often at a level which is inarticulate in speech terms. So this is a film in which we mostly don’t hear dancers’ voices, but, rather, the instructions and declamations of coaches and choreographers. Otherwise the logic is visual and the viewer is left to rely mostly on visual cues for insight into the world being depicted.



As a hymn to wordlessness, absorbed attention, and extreme physical endurance La Danse is attractive. (one interviewee recalls Maurice Béjart’s characterisation of the ballerina as “half nun, half boxer”). I was reminded a little of Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence (2005), an uncompromising portrait of the monastery of Grand Chartreuse in the French Alps, in which the viewer is invited to experience the monastic world on its own terms. La Danse depicts the reality of a ballet company’s existence; half a dozen productions in various stages of preparation, along with whatever is onstage that night; the bewildering variety of styles that today’s dancers are expected to take on board; the evanescence both of the art form and of the dancers’own bodies (in one sequence the personnel director talks to the dancers about the pensions they can expect when they have to retire at 40).
But La Danse raises as many questions as answers. Wiseman’s structure navigates around long sequences of actuality of ballets in the making. Rehearsal sequences from The Nutcracker will make sense to many viewers. But you will be fortunate if you recognise the choreographers Wayne McGregor, Mats Ek and Angelin Preljocaj. They are never introduced, not even with a gentle nudge from subtitles. There are fascinating fragments from individual ballets (identified only in the films’ closing titles): the climax of Preljocaj's Medea with the lead dancer spilling buckets of blood over two child performers. Or the screaming deranged sisters of Mats Ek’s treatment of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. Wiseman’s determination not to bend his narrative rule leaves a general audience at a disadvantage. The dance-knowledgeable, on the other hand, will struggle with work torn from its context.


Wiseman’s focus on form and on the intrinsic nature of the dance reinforces the silence of the dancers and their lack of agency. There is nothing of the many tensions behind this microcosmic world. But this is not the film Wiseman chose to make. It’s a reasonable choice and it is a relief to watch a documentary about dance without a whisper of the word ‘journey’. There are hints of the down side to conformity; dancers’ resistance to classes in contemporary dance (as distinct from classical ballet), even though their director commissions mostly contemporary choreographers.
La Danse is beautifully filmed and very long (160 minutes). Along the way, there are fascinating little diversions; the stage-hand who keeps beehives on the roof (the honey is sold in the Opera shop). Fascinating too is the building’s labyrinth; underground streams and grottos with an exotic plant and fish life. Most revealing for me was an audio-track during a stage call where choreographer and ballet-master comment mercilessly on the rehearsal in front of their eyes.