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Documentary follows dancers with dreams December 3 , 2006 IT started with a little girl's dream. According to producer Merit Jensen Carr, the inspiration for the three-part documentary Ballet Girls grew out of stories she heard about a young neighbour's passionate desire to win a role in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's annual festive production of The Nutcracker. A dream, perchance, to dance. "It was just so interesting hearing about her experience," Jensen Carr recalled. "And she had friends who had auditioned for the (RWB) school... It was amazing -- I had been wanting to do (a project) with kids, and it was all right here." It was one little girl's dream, but the founder of locally based Merit Motion Pictures knew it was the kind of dream that is shared by thousands of girls across the country and around the world. And because of that, Jensen Carr believed there was a bigger, beautiful story to be told. After partnering with experienced arts-for-TV producer Vonnie Von Helmolt (Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary, Magic Flute), Jensen Carr enlisted the services of director Elise Swerhone to helm the project. What followed was a yearlong odyssey that took the Ballet Girls crew across the country in search of young dancers with hopes of joining the RWB's professional school. Ballet Girls, which premieres Monday at 8 p.m. on Bravo (and continues Dec. 11 and 18 in the same timeslot), is a dance documentary in three acts. The first instalment follows young ballerinas as they audition for a spot in the RWB's summer-school program; the second part explores the summer students' rigorous training and tryouts for the ballet's full-time professional school; and the conclusion focuses on the professional division's training regimen and the efforts of a handful of teenage students to win the coveted role of Clara in The Nutcracker. It's a fascinating journey, and Jensen Carr said one of the things that made Ballet Girls so interesting to make was the unexpectedly wide range of personalities and backgrounds in the RWB's student body. "The thing that really surprised us was the diversity, both economically and culturally," she said. "They came from so many different backgrounds; there was a much wider cross-section of society than I would have expected." Among those featured in the series are Katherine, 13, a gifted dancer from Stonewall whose tightly wound personality becomes an obstacle on her road to a ballet career; Sierra, 10, a Torontonian whose considerable talent isn't matched by the necessary drive to succeed; Melissa, 14, a privileged B.C. resident who must decide between her dance dreams and at-home equestrian aspirations; Carmen, 11, the daughter of Chinese-immigrant parents who sacrifice many things to support her artistic dreams; and Catherine, 15, a Winnipegger whose years of committed RWB study may finally produce a big payoff. "It's hard, when you're doing something about ballet, because they're all wearing exactly the same clothing and they all have their hair in a bun," Jensen Carr offered. "If you don't have girls who bring something distinctly different, it's difficult to watch and keep track of who's who. So it was important to us to find girls who had different appearances and different personalities. "After we saw all the footage from the auditions ... we looked at it as sort of a metaphor for Canada. It's an immigrants' story, as much as anything else -- it wasn't elitist, it wasn't upper middle-class; just as often as not, it was about very hard-working immigrant families that were making huge sacrifices to give their daughters the opportunity to have a career in dance." Throughout the Ballet Girls experience, the one thing that remained constant among all the subjects who stayed with the RWB school was their determination to become dancers. It's true that some of the girls were also living out their parents' dreams, but the rigours of the RWB training would simply be too much for a youngster without her own deep-rooted dance desire. "There were stage moms, absolutely," said Jensen Carr. "There were moms who basically told us that this was their dream, but unless it's something that their daughters completely share, that won't be enough. "In every instance that we shot, it was the girls who were making the decisions -- they were the ones telling their parents that they needed to leave home if they wanted to follow their dream of becoming a dancer." In all, the Ballet Girls crew shot more than 200 hours of footage, which were eventually edited down to the series' three one-hour episodes. Jensen Carr said the nearly 70-to-1 footage-to-finished-product ratio meant some very difficult choices had to be made in the editing room. And it also left Ballet Girls' producers with so much unused material that they're considering the notion of repurposing some of it into a feature-film documentary. |