16mm film close-up of a ballet shoe being untied.
A music box ballerina frees herself from the mechanism that imprisons her.
For six decades Angela Bowen, classical dancer and teacher, black lesbian feminist activist, and professor has influenced and inspired untold numbers speaking out as strongly for the Arts, Black and Women's Rights as she has for Lesbian and Gay Rights. The film depicts Bowen's life across the decades, from the early fifties, with historic footage, photographs and interviews including her dance mentor, dance partner, former husband, partner, children, activists, scholars, and dance and university students. Bowen's candid and compelling stories allow us to understand how race, class, gender, age, and sexuality played into her decisions and choices, her mission, and strategies for survival. Passionate Pursuits is intended to challenge and inspire diverse audiences to pursue their own dreams with tenacity and courage, but not for themselves alone.
A ballerina, whose pointe shoes are extended by a set of sharp kitchen knives, dances and twirls insistently until reaching exhaustion, fighting to maintain balance on the lid of a grand piano set on a stage. The theatre with its red velvet warm lighting, resembles an oversized music box. The camera turns around the dancer revealing the opposite side of the room: an empty and painfully bare theatre. The ballerina appears as an eerie figure expressing effort, sacrifice and pain in her strive for perfection. Both fragile and cruel. Initially shy and hesitant, her steps become more and more emphatic, menacing and not exempt of violence, scraping and cutting into the delicate surface of the piano with her sharp pointe shoes.
A statue that dreams and a very special robot cleaner that works in the museum.
A parable about a thwarted dream. A narrator tells us about a young woman who wants, more than anything, to be a ballerina. Thanks to animation, we see the problem: her legs make up about three-quarters of her height. She sees the impossibility of her dream and moves to a house on an isolated hill where she lives by herself, lonely, practicing her art, and then, in near despair, taking up knitting. Madness seems close at hand, but is there anything that can bring hope and pull her from her solitary, circumscribed life?
A mother and daughter struggle between fantasy and reality.
This Christmas, step into the magical world of The Nutcracker. For the first time in many years, the Royal Ballet has given full access behind the scenes for a landmark 90-minute documentary as they prepare for this season's yuletide production.
A Delicate Balance explores the life and dreams of young dancers at the dawn of adolescence. A tender and captivating documentary in which the students of the Quebec Superior Ballet School tell each other with candid lucidity.
A clumsy yokel of a male weed courts a delicate female flower ballerina by trying to dance with her.
“This is an absolutely new and extraordinary subject. A juggler takes in succession about a dozen eggs out of his servant's mouth. He breaks all the eggs into a hat, and after having beaten them up after the manner of a cook, he extracts an egg as large as the hat itself. As soon as he sets this egg on the table there appears a tiny dancing girl, full of life, as big as a baby's doll, and who performs on the table some beautiful stage dances. All of a sudden she increases to the size of a ordinary woman, and jumping on the floor she delights the audience with her turns. The juggler and the dancing girl disappear in the most extraordinary way.” (Méliès Catalog)
A ballerina is getting ready for the hardest test of her life. Old memories erupt during her dance performance.
During the Edwardian era, a working-class ballet dancer begins a romance with a wealthy artist against a background of sharp disapproval.
The "boys" from Pine Ridge visit Europe and try to help a Yugoslavian ballerina find her American lover, become involved with French jewel thieves, and take on posh society in Monte Carlo.
Ortensia is a mechanical ballerina, that every day is forced to dance for an audience, in a seemingly endless loop. But one day, she sees in the crowd someone drawing her: the first representation of herself as an individual.
A biographical look at the career of the acclaimed Margot Fonteyn. As a little girl called Peggy Hookham growing up in Shanghai, she told her mother she would one day become the greatest dancer in the world. Still performing at the age of 67 despite being almost unable to walk, hers is a story of courage and tenacity, of unbelievable devotion to her art and to those whom she loved. Those who ultimately left her penniless and alone, to be buried in a pauper’s grave.
Ling Ai and He Jiang are young, ambitious, and in pursuit of careers imported from the West, but romantic longings and career ambitions are inevitably shaped by larger social forces.
Wealthy Jack Stimson (Jay Belasco) falls in love with Broadway diva Velma Vrooman (Gretchen Lederer), and for her sake bankrolls the musical production in which she is currently starred. But when Velma proves to be fickle and unreliable, Jack shifts his affections to humble chorus girl Bobbie (Louise Lovely).
A contemporary ballet dancer helps a pianist recover from his hand injury after causing him to fall down the stairs.