Advent Calendar: Day 8

By Circe -

Ballerinas have a reputation for being crazy. This is not entirely unfounded. It takes a very particular kind of person to spend their life training to perform superhuman feats of athleticism and pretend they're nothing. Two authors with whom I am personally acquainted, Matt Phillion of the YA novel The Indestructibles (https://www.theindestructiblesbook.com/) and Phoebe Roberts of the Mrs Hawking series of plays (http://www.mrshawking.com/) independently sat down and had the thought, "You know who would be crazy enough to be Batman? A ballerina."

Margot Fonteyn was an English ballerina of the early to mid-twentieth century, who enjoyed considerable renown. Her career spanned decades in an art form where even now top dancers retire well before forty, and her performance style had wide-ranging influences visible to this very day.

The linked documentary is quite long, but I promise there is something in it for everyone. The first two-thirds is a charming story of an unlikely but ambitious girl who found her passion in dance, and follows her career through a series of triumphs and misadventures that were probably terrifying at the time, but seem picturesque through the lens of a documentarian decades removed from the chaos. It is very pleasant and I dozed through most of it.

I did wake up around the part where she married the dictator of a banana republic and started gun running. As I said, something for everyone here.

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