Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet, early October, my living room

So I finally got around to watching this documentary after finally having broken down and joined Netflix. Other than the postal service sometimes taking more than a week to get a movie from Netflix to me, it's been great to have access to a much broader selection of dance videos than are availble at the local rental store. (It doesn't take much, does it?)

The movie explores the daily lives and careers of dancers in all five levels of the company: quadrille (sort of a permanenet understudy), coryphée (member of the corps), sujet (solists), premier danseur (principal), and étoile (prima ballerina and whatever they call the male equivalent). I'm sure some of this is fascinating to the general public, but it's actually not that interesting if you've trained in an intense ballet program and performed with a company, professional or not. After all, I know that ballet dancers start young, that the competition is extreme, and that dancers' careers are short.

There were a few interesting things along the way, though, including the discussion of how the view of motherhood has changed over the years. As in other professions, it seems to have gone from "once you get married/pregnant you're out" to "parenthood makes you a better dancer." There were also a few dancers whose parents had been Etoiles, which surely must give you a leg up (so to speak) on advancement in the associated school. After all, the teachers probably see someone's potential more clearly if they're familiar with her mother's dancing.

There was a lot of discussion of particular choreography and what it was like to dance it, but disappointingly short snippets of the dances themselves. If there wasn't time for it in the film, they might have at least included excerpts on the DVD.

The film was, naturally enough, in French. I took French in high school and can read it fairly well, but I could only follow what people were saying by reading the subtitles. It was amusing, then, when the film would switch to a classroom shot and the teachers were calling out ballet steps - all of a sudden, I could understand what they were saying. Mon dieu! C'est un miracle!