While I work on my documentary, “Where Dances Come From,” I’m watching as much dance on film as possible. This week I put on Ballet Now, the documentary following Tyler Peck, the first woman to curate Los Angeles Music Center’s lauded showcase of contemporary ballet.
Billed as the first time a woman curated this lauded program rings slightly untrue after digging into the history of BalletNOW. The program, launched in 2015 and curated by Herman Cornejo and Roberto Bolle, featured an international cast of stars including Argentinian dancer Paloma Herrera and Ballet Nacional de Cuba dancer Viengsay Valdés. The 2017 showcase, filmed for this documentary, was the second in the series and was coordinated by Tyler Peck. Featuring a fully American cast, the diversity represented in the choreography is formal rather than cultural. Dancers come from major American companies as well as So You Think You Can Dance. Peck, it should be noted, dances for New York City Ballet, coming from the Balanchine tradition, which in and of itself stripped dance narratives down to their essence and placed the focus of each dance on its spatial and physical form.
One review from The Daily Dot makes the bold statement, “Hulu’s ‘Ballet Now’ Shows Off Wondrous Dancing – But Little Else.” This also is not entirely true.
The real story in this film is the conflict between Peck and her mother and Peck’s driving perfectionism to get the show right. Tyler grew up in LA, but lives in New York, so she’s not often with her family back in California. As all day rehearsals get underway, she has several interactions with her family. In fact, the groundwork for Peck’s dancing was laid in her mother’s dance studio. As she began dancing, it became clear she was learning and progressing far faster than other students, and for her to really do something with dance she would need to study in LA. Grandma stepped in and would drive Tyler six hours – three one way and three back – several nights per week into her teen years, to study at larger and more established studios.
There is some tension with her mother over a sandwich.
“You never eat the whole thing!” her mother quips.
“Mom, I just danced fourteen ballets.”
Though but a moment, this conversation could be one root of the driving perfection behind the show. Dancers rehearse right up to the opening curtain, and there’s a moment where you think, “Will Tyler be able to complete the show?”
The challenge of curating, setting and performing in nearly every piece is astonishing, almost a self flagellation en pointe, and yet the performance comes off. We see the resolution of little challenges, like how to work out a rhythmic tap piece across hiphop and ballet styles – the contrast of clowning and ballet in Time It Was/116 co created between Bill Irwin, Tiler Peck and Damien Woetzel, and how a cast of eight dancers can come together in four days to get the timing right in Justin Peck’s (no relation to Tiler Peck) In Creases.
The story becomes “how much pressure can Tiler place herself under and still pull through?”
Dance Documentary: A Genre in Transition
In dance documentary there’s a current struggle in how to represent dance on film. Fredric Wieseman’s Ballet – A Profile of the American Ballet Theatre and more recent La Danse, which follows the Paris Opera ballet in much the way his former documentary did, set the tone for docs in the genere – a dispassionate camera documenting the behind the scenes activities that ready dancers for their amazing performances – stretching, taking class, rehearsing, business meetings and negotiating roles. Today’s dance documentaries are trying to infuse more conflict and tension into the story – but how can they do that? Push the dancer to a nearly impossible task as the camera follows along behind. Another follows the story of Sergei Filin as he recovers from an acid attack by a group of company dancers and navigates the politics as a new director comes in to manage the company.
I believe there is an open question in the area of the dance documentary about how to tell meaningful stories within the dance community. How do we talk about effort and work? How do we talk about health and dancer self-care? How do we negotiate company politics, employment and real recognition of the arts as a meaningful career? How do we represent and explore cultural, performative and technical diversity in the arts?
Ballet Now is a good step in the direction of exploring issues in the arts. I believe more could have been done to explore the selection process and intention behind the aesthetic of the event (culture and aesthetics) as well as Tiler’s personal journey through the film. In the dance documentary category we are seeing many more stories come forward as access to gear and interest in the genre expand. My hope is we can create a dynamic discourse within the dance documentary category to tell many more stories around and through dance.