Between aesthetics and torture: why ballet is brutal, sexist, yet beautiful

Ballet was my obsession. My absolute obsession. At night I dreamed of figures I had not yet mastered, during the day I did not like to talk about anything else, I waddled around in an amazingly graceful duck walk because my feet no longer knew how to walk, even when they were outside turned, and if they bled after the pointe dance, it was as satisfying to me as a knife cutting into intact skin is to others.

My ideas about love were shaped by the characters of classical narrative ballets: Odette from «Swan Lake», who can only transform herself from a swan into a woman through the love of a man; Giselle, who commits suicide out of unrequited love; Julia, who commits suicide because of family-related obstacles to love, all women who sacrifice themselves for love or go crazy for it. Beautiful role models. I wanted to become a dancer. Fortunately, my parents were against it.

Ballet, I now say in a Skype conversation to the Tessiner documentary film director Laura Kaehr, was my heaven and my hell, the addictive merging of my body in the highest aesthetics and at the same time so much pain. “Yes, yes,” says Laura Kaehr, “exactly,” she knows, the Ticino woman was a professional dancer herself until she was 27, when she got out.

How is that possible? «The last time I worked with the Belgian Jan Fabre», Fabre was a Godfather institution of modern dance, «he made a project about violence and rape. And he was obsessed with insects. Most of the other dancers were completely in love with him, but I said to myself: What the fuck, this is bullshit! It’s not interesting and it’s torture. Well, now he’s in jail.”

She does not go into detail about the insects, one does not even want to imagine what Fabre could have done with them, no one has exploited young dancers’ fear of unemployment as sadistically as he. Solos were clearly spoken against sex, cries of pain on stage not only had to sound real, but also be real, during a photo shoot he unannounced stuffed strawberries into a dancer’s vagina, and a lawsuit followed. Now he is in prison. And Laura Kaehr made a ballet film.

Movies often highlight the dark side of ballet, the psychotic, the anorexia, horror movies like “Black Swan” or “The Red Shoes”, where physical destruction and loss of reality intersect, or series like “Flesh and Bone” and “Tiny Pretty stuff “. They hit a core, that of the dangerously beautiful loss of self. Laura Kaehr’s film “Becoming Giulia” tells the opposite, telling the story of a real dancer, Giulia Tonelli, prima ballerina at the Zurich Opera House.

Laura Kaehr and Giulia Tonelli’s main concern is to show how a career as a dancer can be combined with the birth of a child. Actually not at all. Not in a world of rehearsals by day and performances by night. Not in a world where the protagonists always have to be thin, muscular and as ethereal as possible, where even breast growth becomes a problem. Not in a world that is always asking for exhaustion.

“What’s not normal about ballet is that men are in charge almost everywhere. I’ve never met a choreographer who liked women’s bodies. Ideally, we should look like boys,” says Kaehr.

“The idea of ​​combining motherhood with a career as a dancer in such an environment becomes a problem, a source of fear, a taboo for young women. The ballet world is a microcosm that has not really made the leap to the present. And at the helm are men with an old-fashioned, regal sense of power. Do you remember the chief choreographer from Hanover who recently smeared a reviewer with dog shit? What kind of world does he live in! Public institutions have a great responsibility to harmonize culture and society.”

Could childbirth and ballet be similar from a physical, female perspective? As for the level of intensity and pain? “I didn’t even think about that, but yes, that’s right,” says Kaehr.

Classical ballet still too often imitates an old time, choreographies that are more than a hundred years old. “The opera is much fresher, more contemporary, bold new interpretations and stories, I would like that for the ballet too.” For example, “Sleeping Beauty” should get to the point much more directly. “Let’s be honest: this is the story of a girl who gets her period. Full stop. What’s this bullshit about the coil she used to prick her finger when she was 15? Your body changes and that’s traumatic. It would many girls would help if you told the story of Sleeping Beauty differently.”

Giulia Tonelli is 39 today, when she shot with Kaehr four years ago, she had just given birth to her first son, was on maternity and maternity leave and wanted to return to the stage after an eleven-month break. Your body reacts after the break with the most horrible pain. But Julia is happy. Dancing is her ‘identity’, her favorite state of aggregation, the ‘ground’ under her feet, for many others the career is already over at this age, but Giulia still dances Juliet in her mid-thirties and receives standing ovations.

Her husband, an ETH engineer from Austria, helps where he can, her Italian parents occasionally join the herd, her father works at Cern in Geneva, but Giulia is responsible for most of the career coordination of children. It’s a gauntlet of childcare with two or three nannies, constantly changing rehearsal schedules, and irrefutable playdates. She doesn’t want to be the one with the kid, who’s always late and demands too many people depend on her. And she wonders how soon her career will be over now. Will her son ever remember her as a dancer?

Her problem is that she likes narrative ballets more than abstract ones, that a story is just as important to her as acrobatics. But she doesn’t want and can’t dance consumptive teens anymore, and she doesn’t like the comedic roles that remain. She wants new things. For a woman who will soon be forty and cannot imagine a life without dance. She contacts British choreographer Cathy Marston. Marston, says Kaehr, has already created many narrative ballets based on great novels and their heroines, “Wuthering Heights”, “Lolita”, “Lady Chatterley”.

She is working with Giulia Tonelli on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, the story of a woman who gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to reveal the father (it is the minister). It is great to see how the two women rehearse, every microparticle of movement is filled with story, everything has to be right so that in the end a text becomes a danced story.

It’s great to see Giulia Tonelli dance in general, her body work is sheer wonder, her expressiveness overwhelming, as if her body is constantly talking, in a language she invented herself and yet everyone immediately understands, as if she were reciting something like that as the most exciting poem in the world.

The fact that this is transferred to the screen is also the work of Kaehr’s cameramen Felix Muralt and Stéphane Kuthy. “I sent them to ballet lessons for the first time in their lives,” says Kaehr, “and they accepted the challenge with joy and talent! As they followed Giulia on stage, they had to dance with her, otherwise we would never have been so close I don’t like it when you make a movie about dance and you don’t feel the body I want the audience to feel the full force of a movement Giulia thought I was too hard on them, she was always afraid of them both.” It was worth it, Kaehr, Tonelli, the cameramen and everyone else won the Audience Award at the Zurich Film Festival.

How does a dancer come up with the idea of ​​becoming a film director? In Kaehr’s case, Monte Verità is to blame. Her great-grandfather, the master gardener Friedrich Kähr from Minusio, belonged to the wild nude dance and vegetarian bohème on the hill near Ascona. He laid out a “peace garden” on the Monte and also wrote a “peace flower opera”.

‘He was a militant peace activist’, says his great-granddaughter, ‘who hadn’t had his opera performed before the Second World War. I decided to finish his work and close the family circle. This became my short documentary ‹1927›. If, like me, you grew up between the two film cities of Locarno and Cannes, where I studied dance, it feels very natural to go into film at some point. »

Kaehr has found her calling. Tonelli sticks to hers, she pushed through and overcame all obstacles, her story is one of the most positive in the ballet world, which in the past year was especially marked by headlines about structural sadism in the main dance schools in Zurich and Basel and at the Bern Ballet ensemble made a name for itself. And now, in 2023, something is happening that was not known when the film was shot: Cathy Marston will be the new ballet director of the Zurich Opera House.

The two women will develop there many things worth seeing together, that’s for sure, they will break new ground and create new works. A menstruating Sleeping Beauty remains speculation, but the scarlet letter, which is only seen as a beautiful sketch in the film, certainly has a good chance of being perfected in Zurich.

“Becoming Giulia” will be in cinemas from March 23. Premiere events with Laura Kaehr are already taking place, click here for the special screenings.