Ballet is beautiful. Ballet is ethereal. Ballet is mysterious.
Can ballet also be cool?
The creators of the new Prime Video show “Étoile” – Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” fame — are betting yes. Or, shall we say “oui” – the show is split between New York and Paris as it tracks the story of two ballet companies joining forces to attract audiences and stay afloat.
And “afloat” is a good word to describe the chief appeal of the show: real lifts, not to mention turns and leaps, by real ballet dancers, many of whom are in the cast. Sharp-eyed viewers might notice several New York City Ballet stars in supporting roles. A mix of “Bunheads” (also from the Palladinos), “Emily in Paris” — with way more leg warmers — and perhaps classic ballet movie “The Turning Point,” “Étoile” seems to know it lives and dies by the quality of its dancing.
You can’t fake it
And that’s because, as actor David Alvarez says, “Ballet is one of those things you can’t fake.”
“You can’t just wing it and pretend you can do it,” says Alvarez, who made his name as one of the original dancing Billy Elliots on Broadway, winning a best-actor Tony along with two other Billys at age 14, and later played Bernardo in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” remake.
“Any dancer will be able to spot from a mile away that you’re not actually a ballet dancer, just by how you walk or your posture,” he says.
Alvarez plays Gael, a dancer who has a stormy relationship with Cheyenne, herself a very stormy prima ballerina — or “étoile,” the French word for “star” — who comes to New York as part of an elaborate talent swap between the two companies.
The gimmick has made uneasy partners of Jack, who runs Metropolitan Ballet Theater in New York, and Geneviève (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who runs the top company in Paris. (The two troupes are very thinly veiled versions of New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet.)
Dancers learned to act, and actors to dance
Alvarez is one of those hybrids, an actor who also dances. Taïs Vinolo, who plays young dancer Mishi, is a real-life ballet dancer who’s making her acting debut.
Normally, she says, “We express with our body. Expressing with another form, like speaking and acting, was a bit of a challenge.”
Minolo feels confident that the creators found the truth in ballet. “People don’t have a good idea of what ballet is and how hard it is,” she says. “They see the pink tutu and the pointe shoes. But they don’t see that it’s very physical. And it’s hard. It’s a lot of discipline, and it’s also very hard mentally.”
Ballet dancers are trained athletes
The physical challenge of ballet was just what Sherman-Palladino was looking to get across. The showrunner trained seriously in ballet from the age of 4, before fate guided her into a writing career.
“And she has the back surgeries to prove it,” quips husband Dan.
“It’s an amazing world,” says Sherman-Palladino. “They’re amazing artists. And it’s literally an art form where you’re just guaranteed not to make any money. So you have to truly just love it.
“You know, they’re trained athletes,” Sherman-Palladino adds. “They’re unbelievably strong, and just the things that they can do with their bodies is ridiculous.”
She sees dance as like “silent movies almost — it’s storytelling, it’s acting, it’s emotion and heartache and happiness and love … I think that so many people who think that dance is not for them just haven’t seen it.”
Lost in translation?
Some of the French cast members barely spoke English, and vice versa. The show takes place in two languages — but the signature rat-a-tat Palladino banter can be hard to translate.
“It was tricky because we are very precise with our language, but our language doesn’t exactly translate to French,” Sherman-Palladino says. “Finding a translator may have been the hardest thing that we had to deal with on the entire show — the right translator that caught the essence of our script. So we kept changing translators ’til we finally found one that everybody could agree on.”
For Lou De Laâge, who plays Cheyenne, it was especially challenging because she spoke little English when she was cast. But the writer’s strike meant she had nine months to prepare, rather than three, which proved a huge help.
Gainsbourg, a British-French actor and singer-songwriter, spoke English but still found it tricky to get into the Palladino rhythm. “I was very nervous about learning the lines,” she says. “I’m very slow. That was already challenging. Then the rhythm was something completely new. … in the end, I got to understand the humor and the pace, (but) it took me a little while.”
Learning what ballet is all about
Kirby, whose Jack runs Metropolitan Ballet Theater, says he knew little about ballet beforehand — but had a cousin who was a dancer, “and so I’d see her putting her body through torment.”
Gainsbourg only spent a year studying ballet when she was 4. She stopped but did piano in the same building — the Salle Pleyel in Paris — and remembers the elevator stopping on the ballet floor, where she’d go into the dressing room and pick up “a very good, talcum powder smell. And that’s my emotional remembrance of ballet.”
As for De Laâge, her mother enrolled her in intensive dance training as a child, but it was a mother’s dream and not the daughter’s.
“So that became a fight between us because she wanted that for me, and I didn’t want that for me,” De Laâge says. As an actor, “I worked with really good dancers, but that wasn’t my passion. I love watching dance.”
What Gainsbourg has taken away from doing a series on ballet is “the fact that it’s so extreme and that everybody is working there for their passion. It’s not about money … it’s really about the art, and they’re all completely passionate.”
Just don’t touch the pointe shoes!
Ask the real ballerinas in the cast — for example, NYCB stars Tiler Peck and Unity Phelan, who play small roles, as does former principal Robbie Fairchild — and they’ll tell you: Ballerinas sew their own ribbons on their pointe shoes. Nobody does it for them.
So Minolo had to demur when, on the series, the crew offered to sew the ribbons on for her.
“I have a very specific way,” she explains. “And I don’t like when people touch my pointe shoes. I like to stitch the edge of my pointe shoes to make the platform bigger.”
“I do that too!” replies Alvarez, and the two laugh. “Good for balancing.”
“Yeah exactly,” Minolo giggles. “You understand.”
