Art FIFA 2013: The Ballet Masters

The Ballet Masters 

Netherlands | 2012 | colour | 59 min | English, Dutch, English subtitles

PRODUCTION TEAM

Director: Sonia Herman Dolz
Cinematography: Paul van den Bos, Sonia Herman Dolz
Sound: Menno Euwe
Editing: Rémi Van Der Heiden
Music: Paul M. Van Brugge
Participation: Rachel Beaujean, Guillaume Graffin, Larissa Lezhnina, Arthur Shesterikov
Producer(s): Michiel Van Erp, Monique Busman
Production: De Familie
Distribution: De Familie

Official description of the film:

After brilliant respective careers as principal dancers, Guillaume Graffin and Rachel Beaujean have become ballet masters with the Dutch National Ballet, where they prepare a performance of the legendary Giselle (1841). Rather than an oral history, the film shows how choreographic history is handed down, the literal, physical transfer of crucial knowledge from one generation of dancers to the next, a process that is usually invisible to the outside world. Building a bridge between past and present, the ballet masters play a key role behind the scenes. Without them, the heritage of hundreds of years of classical ballet repertoire would die.

This  film documents the artistic workings of the Dutch National Ballet. The title The Ballet Masters denotes the professionals, most often the former lead dancers, who conduct rehearsals and prepare dancers for the company's repertoire. But regardless of its title,  the film's scope is actually much wider as it encompasses other aspects of the successful ballet making.

First of all, the film shows most directly how the ballet's best classical traditions are being passed onto the new generation of dancers. It reveals the art of the ballet masters as they bring out the best in the dancers and create a harmonious and coherent whole of the masterpiece that the audience will see on the stage. The focus is on the painstaking coaching of both the principal as well as supporting and secondary dancers to perform one of the most romantic classical ballet Giselle. 

At the same time, the film highlights the mastery of the dancers themselves. It shows how they train, practice their movements over and over again, while soaking in the creative guidance of their ballet masters, transforming it into their body movements, gestures, and emotional expressions. It shows the artistic and emotional artistry of principal dancers, their performing splendour and maturity.

This film is also about how body movements and expressive means of the ballet are used to tell a story without words and  in such a way as to enchant the audience, while making everything look perfectly effortless, regardless of the strain, of hours of practising involved, and even of physical pain.

If you love the ballet, or do not know much about it and would like to learn how it is made, then this film is definitely for you.

Photo above courtesy of FIFA.