The Dancer

After seeing Donya Feuer's The Dancer, a ballet performance seems like an amazing disguise. On stage, the dances have such graceful fluidity; the dancers themselves appearing as feminine fragile creatures in delicate costumes--not the sweating, hurting athletes they actually are. Following the training of Katja Borner at the Royal Swedish Ballet School, The Dancer reveals the back-breaking, body-bending, toe-crunching effort involved in ballet and the compulsive perfectionist mindset the dancer must maintain in order to achieve any success. Even those pale-pink toe shoes, so seemingly quaint, are like torture devices the dancer must withstand. At one point, Feuer remarkably contrasts the warm-up exercises of the dancer with the making of ballet shoes, each an intense, almost agonizing labor. Recommended. (L. Russo)