This is a true story, Joy Womack is the dancer portrayed here and she was the first American to graduate from The Bolshoi Ballet Academy and only the second America to dance with the Bolshoi.
Oh man. I was in a ballet academy was I was younger. Directed by a Russian teacher. My mom eventually pulled me out... but 15+ years later I'm still recovering from the trauma. 🙃
My mother did ballet and she said that she had to check her pointe shoes every time she danced. She also had to check the stitching on her costumes too.
Because ballet has been around for centuries now and people who are in that kind of world take pride in the tradition, which makes it the most competitive style of dancing.
Because it's extremely hostile towards the body and at the same time extremely competetive : there are very few theaters and there are a lot of dancers. So, after they sacrificed many years practicing, starving and aggresively stretching they find out that all that sacrifice isn't nearly enough for success. There are just a couple of theaters in a country and there is only one prima in each theater. So yeah, it's a matter of life and death for them. No one wants to dedicate all the childhood and youth to the agressive painful training and then find out that one's career consists of being a background no-name dancer (if you are lucky enough to be in the theater at all).
Cannot wait to see this. Yes, I hear so much about glass in the pointe shoes and half cutting ribbons so they break when you mid performance, calling you by your weight and not your name (47 kilos), drawing on your 'fat' bits with magic marker, telling you to smoke for weight loss. Ice skating is ruthless too; carry your bag with you everywhere or your rivals bang the blades on concrete to blunt them. Either that or slash your costume.
As a pro ballet dancer I know this film is going to be all over the dance world. I just watched Challengers today, all about tennis. Nice to see a ballet movie coming though I don't consider it a sport but an art. It will be interesting to watch!😍
Is it supposed to be a quasi-sequel to the Black Swan (2011)? The teaser gives the impression of similar storylines of the pursuit of perfection...and somewhat similar composition... only in different contexts. Can Hollywood ever get over itself?
This is so weird. I used to watch Joy's vlogs when she was at the Bolshoi academy and afterwards, when she was dancing for the kremlin ballet in moscow. Didn't look half this dramatic lol. But I didn't wonder what the full story behind her leaving was.
The 'foreign(er)' being pushed to prove if the, "soulfulness within" is authentic enough to pass off as, uhm, "pure" or the other way around perhaps...😅J.K Simmons and Miles Teller vibes 😉
The film was written and directed by James Napier Robertson who is a New Zealander, and produced by British and New Zealand media companies so you can leave our name out of this one, thank you. 💙
There is a reason why Baryshnikov defected. More interesting to me is the fact that he learned English from Alvin Alley. Would that there was video of Misha performing with Judith Jamieson in Pas de Duke.
The Americans: Spy drama show about Russian KGB spies living in the United States. The American: Ballet drama film about an American ballet dancer training in a Russian academy.
"The Bolshoi Theatre was our best global brand," says composer Vladimir Martynov bitterly. "Unfortunately, it has decayed, and like everything in our country, it's like a rotten Fabergé egg-golden and diamond-studded on the outside, but rotten inside."
