Movies like to dance around the truth

New film Black Swan is not real life says Northern Ballet dancer Rym Kechacha.

AS surely as doctors dread new questions about how similar their daily routine is to an episode of ER, dancers sigh wearily as people ask us if this or that latest dance film accurately shows what a performer's life is really like.

Hollywood loves to cast us dancers as anorexic perfectionists with no interests outside of the ballet studio, but this is almost always false.

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Black Swan, a new film by Darren Aronofsky, does nothing to dispel these myths surrounding the ballerina as an obsessive martyr, suffering grandly for her art.

Golden Globe winner Natalie Portman does a fine job of imitating a ballet dancer, but a few months' training is not really sufficient to portray a person who has made this art form their life from a very young age. Ballet aside, as a psychological thriller it can be chilling.

Dedicated Nina is perfectly suited to perform the delicate Swan Queen in her company's version of Swan Lake, but finds it difficult to muster the necessary passion for her counterpart, the Black Swan. As she delves deep into the darker side of her personality to find inspiration for her big role, her mind unravels.

Against the backdrop of Tchaikovsky's soaring score, her over-protective mother and sexually predatory director, she finds the pressure too much to bear and descends into paranoia and despair.

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So far, so Red Shoes. But a quick glance at other dance films reveals that they all tend to dive headfirst into one celluloid clich or another, even if they don't cast the ballerina as a victim. There are the unlikely, but vastly entertaining dance-offs between ballet and hip-hop dancers in Save the Last Dance and Step Up which celebrate the ballet dancer's grace and discipline while teaching her to relax and loosen up a bit.

Films like Fame or Billy Elliot certainly have the feelgood factor by the bucketload, but tend to be a bit too cheesy for veteran performers who know only too well how tough the theatre can be, and how unlikely it is that optimism will triumph over sheer blind luck. While the dance sequences can be thrilling, none of them truly hone in on the subtleties of this art.

The truth is that the realities of dancers' lives just don't make for very interesting viewing. This profession requires self-absorption, dedication and patience; not the stuff that exciting cinema is made of. The sex and sensationalism isn't nearly as commonplace as everyone seems to think, and the vast majority of dancers are stimulated and well-adjusted people who deal with the same kind of mundane work issues as everyone else.

After all, does your GP look like George Clooney?

Cinema's leaps of imagination

Red Shoes: 1948 movie loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, one of the BFI's Top 10 British films.

Flashdance: Jennifer Beals is a welder by day and a water-soaked dancer in a dubious club by night.

Billy Elliot: The boy caught up in the miners' strike who just wants to dance.

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