The Dancer: a film by Donya Feuer.

"I've always been interested in and inspired by the meeting of an individual with his destiny," says Stockholm-based filmmaker and choreographer Donya Feuer. "When this one body, this person, is a dancer, then it's something, for me, almost holy--because the body becomes itself an instrument. The muscles of the body support the skeleton, and the skeleton in turn is holding something else, and everything is moving. There's nothing that's not moving. Suddenly in a dancer, the moving is chosen and looked at and given some kind of articulation and limits and form."

Feuer has the intensity of personality to match the brilliance and sophistication of her work. Born in Philadelphia, Feuer joined the Martha Graham Company after studying with Graham, Doris Humphrey, Louis Horst, and especially Antony Tudor at Juilliard. Her next major project was founding the Studio for Dance with Paul Sanasardo in New York City, where Pina Bausch was among the young dancers.

Some years later she moved to Stockholm, where she has spent most of her adult life working with the Royal Dramatic Theatre. For thirty years she has collaborated regularly as choreographer with the legendary filmmaker and director Ingmar Bergman. She has danced, directed plays and operas, choreographed ballets, and made two films (The Dancer and A Life, a film about Nijinsky). She is a beautiful woman who can appear cold, but is actually not so at all. She says nothing she is not prepared to defend with passion and turns small talk into conversation by the sheer force of her focused energy. Her new film, The Dancer, is very much like her--a little shocking in its power, energetic, lovely, unforgettable. Both she and her films leave indelible, mysterious images.

Katja Bjorner is the principal subject of The Dancer; the film follows her from the ages of thirteen to eighteen as a student at the Swedish School of Ballet until she leaves Stockholm to become a company member at Het Nationale Ballet in Amsterdam. She is performing, near the end of the film, at age seventeen, the end of the pas de deux with Clint Farha from Rudi van Dantzig's Romeo and Juliet To finish the sequence, Bjorner hands Farha a red rose and then--with an air of innocence and, somehow, tragedy--she turns and looks into the camera as if suddenly, bravely meeting her destiny.

"I was fascinated by Katja when I saw her for the first time," says Feuer, "because I saw that it was with total and unconditional love that she did what she did. I felt that she didn't do movement, she went into movement. She said almost nothing. She's very beautiful. You see it in deer--they have a way of staying there and permitting you to look at them. It's not an invitation, it's permission. I didn't even introduce myself to her."

Much of The Dancer shows Bjorner alone in the studio. Her concentration appears unbreakable. Even when one of Bergman's company of actors (Erland Josephson) is brought in so that we can hear something said, Bjorner speaks with him above the focus on her working body; she is not the kind of person who drops one thing to do another. She has decided to be a ballet dancer, and she guides herself to this goal at every moment. She knows and accepts that that's what it will take and she does it without complaint--in fact with respect and love for this engaging pursuit. Her work is painful ("Something always hurts somewhere," she says to Josephson) and often looks boring (how many tendus can one take an interest in doing?). But one of the emphases in the film is on the necessity and the glory of having something to do. In this sense The Dancer is not so much about ballet as about the long, lonely pursuit of genuine achievement through disciplined, regular effort. Is there genius? Yes, the film says, but it must be learned; work must not be simply done, but gone into. The artist must not hastily invite, but prepare and, when it is time, stay there--still, quiet--and permit the world to look.

"I needed to get people doing what they know how to do," says Feuer, "what they do every day. And out of this come the things that are hidden, or mysterious, or important."

The film is poetic in its attempt to show the full breadth of its simple, metaphorical, lyrical idea. To see the grace, liveliness, and beauty of a well-trained, intelligent dancing body is the goal; Bjorner training and dancing, and the world that surrounds and supports her, are the means. The style of the film is lyric-documentary. The cinematographer, Gunnar Kallstrom, is a master of film photography, and the editor, Kerstin Eriksdotter, is apparently a kind of prodigy--this is her first long film--whose sense of timing and juxtaposition is quick and, like Feuer's, essentially musical. The film contains ninety minutes of the thirty-six hours of material Feuer shot. The impression a viewer gets of having seen an important mystery revealed by Feuer's portrait of a young woman working at ballet has a powerful aesthetic effect. Seriousness and courage--not pretension or mere routine, nor showing off, but the desire to live a life of consequence--are taken seriously, all the more so for appearing in the life of one so young as Bjorner.

"I learned one thing from Doris Humphrey at Juilliard. Humphrey would make a kind of diagram of the music; she would chart the music in terms of bars and then she would do something in her choreography on an odd beat. It would be one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; and on two there would be something happening. You don't count like the music, in the score, you dance to what you hear. Humphrey had found a way to notate this. So I made one of these diagrams for my editor and we began. And I choreographed the images. We knew the situations we had on film, and the situations began to be sequences--after a while almost episodes. We were interested in how the film could move. It was like making a dance. The editing process was always a matter of pulling back, of taking the film from chaos to order."

The Dancer is a film of breathtaking chaos, ordered and shaped by Feuer's musical, choreogaphic imagination. Only during the van Dantzig Romeo and Juliet sequence--the only incident in the film performed especially for the camera--does the music on the soundtrack correspond to the dancing in a conventional way. The film begins with shots of stretching feet and legs--no faces, no "characters," only young dancers preparing for the day's work--to the opening bars of Stravinsky's Firebird. There is a long collage of Sweden's prima ballerina, Anneli Alhanko--Bjorner's local idol and teacher--dancing in Royal Swedish Ballet productions of Manon, Romeo and Juliet, and Miss Julie, all to the "wrong" music, Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence and Serenade for Strings. As we watch this terrifically fast-moving film, it is soon made clear that there is nothing ordinary here, nothing allowed in out of habit; everything is remade, reseen, to produce a new object, an original work of art. The film never tries to explain anything, or teach: it is happily busy showing the unspoken drama of bodies in stylized motion, the abstract beauty of formal movement and expressive action seen against a fresh arrangement of the most exciting, danceable music ever composed.

The freedom with which Feuer brings music together with dance admits of wholly new ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling. "If you insist on dance corresponding to the beat of the music, then the form of what you're doing has already been decided ahead of time. In some way you're doing something that you yourself have not decided on." Order, for Feuer, is really the thing seen in just the right context--a rigorous, uncommon vision.

"The first seeds of the film came when I interviewed Erland Josephson for a magazine. We spoke of Katja, and Erland" said that for him it was remarkable that when you look at children on the street, you can see a dancer immediately. You can't see a painter or a writer or musician if you just look at them, but you can see a dancer in a child if they've studied ballet for a year. You can see what I call the scars Of the work they've done--good scars."

Near the beginning of The Dancer we see a man making pointe shoes. A voice tells us that the shoemaker we see has such big hands that the company had to supply him with extra-large tools. He makes forty-two Pairs of shoes a day; the work requires that he stand up the entire time. Then we see Bjorner buying shoes, sewing shoes, breaking them in--this takes a lot of time in the film. It's as if Feuer believes pointe shoes are essential to her subject. These painful conveyances, strange symbols which aid in verticality and detachment from the ground, are not romanticized by Feuer but are given their place in Bjorner's world. Already at age forteen she is adept at dancing on pointe; by the end of the film her body seems to have appropriated the shoes--we see her naturally as a ballerina, with stretched, extended legs, high on her pointes, turning, balancing in attitude. The shoes themselves become charged with vicarious energy; they begin to be part of the mystery, and the drama.

"The very fact that the body is expressing it, is being an instrument for it, is--well, what more do we need to know?"

Again and again, from a thousand points of view, we see dancers in action, looking more than human, expressive of things words can't get at. "However much one loves words, it's good to get outside them," Josephson says. And there is always Bjorner, making a silent, steady progress in the education of her body.

"I met Makarova," says Feuer, "and told her I wanted to make a film and said I'd like her to be in it. I asked her if she could come to the school and she said no, she had no time, but she said to tell Katja to come and take class with her. She said to me, you can't come up the first half hour but you can come up later. But no filming. She was taking a private class with Misha Messerer. They were preparing for her performance that night, just doing things she needed to do. Katja was like a fish in water--she'd never done most of these things and she was standing in back of Makarova and she was taller. We never could film that, but Makarova said after that--it was her idea--that her last night of Romeo and Juliet at the Opera, while she was taking her bows, Katja could stand behind the curtain and we could film Makarova bowing and Katja watching. That's what we have of Makarova in the film, just a very short bit. That was the first filming we did."

We see Bjorner being coached by Alhanko and Michael Messerer, and in class with Aleksander Khmelnitski and Valentina Savina of the Bolshoi Theatre. What is most striking about the teaching is the clear intention of the teachers to convey nothing less than an idea of perfection to the student. The important thing becomes the smallest thing, the most exquisite refinement--the distance of the hands from each other in a port de bras, the precise height and speed of a battement developpe a la seconde, the angle a stretched arm makes with the torso. "It's possible to teach everything--or to ruin everything," Savina says.

A student of ballet cannot learn the art in isolation, and no one can know what great dancing is without seeing examples of it. Not only can the dancer not be separated from the dance, she also cannot be separated from the history of dancing, from the line of dancers and teachers leading to her. Neither can any other artist succeed at making important work without grappling with what came before; Feuer herself had to cope with the terrific force of her mentor, Ingmar Bergman, and overcome the anxiety of making a film under the unofficial auspices of her friend, colleague, and teacher--who happens to be one of the greatest of all filmmakers. She said Bergman not only was supportive of her project but even told her that if he were ten years younger he would have liked to make the film with her.

The relationships of Bjorner with Makarova and Alhanko, paralleled by that of Feuer with Bergman, silently drive the film on. The Dancer is about--and is a product of--apprenticeship, of finding a way to stand on the shoulders of one's predecessors and by so doing to reach a new height of manifest accomplishment. Without the deepest humility--and the severest and most elevating self-regard--this kind of learning cannot take place. Bjorner onscreen is the ideal student: cool, analytical, prepared to work, respectful, and smart. In The Dancer we get a rare glimpse of the method by which art continues.

"The only thing we have is experience, and if we're fortunate we can understand that experience, take it with us, and get more experience. Philosophers and artists and scientists have answered so many questions now; they interfere in the most private ways, but they have not answered the most basic question: Why? Does my film answer that question? Let's say that my film has heard the question and is trying to answer. To see and answer."

Feuer's bracing lack of sentimentality sets The Dancer apart from other films about ballet and dancers; the lyricism it achieves is the result of good artistic decisions, and is not dependent on the static romance outsiders or beginners might confer on the material. The Dancer is concerned with effect, with showing the deep mystery of human spectacle and human experience. The "plot" turns on Bjorner's consuming passion for excellence, on her wish to be supremely expressive, and on her steady, solitary progress.

The final image of the film, before the credits, is of Bjorner at the barre, facing a window through which there is nothing much to see--mostly the sky and the topsof some ordinary buildings. She is alone in the studio, working on passe, her torso completely still, breathing hard, sweating, intent. It's a striking and lovely picture for us; for Bjorner, such solitary work, in a quiet studio without distractions, and such unspectacular progress are simply the conditions of the life to which she has committed herself. We see, in this single shot, in these few seconds of film, the eloquence and the ennui, the extreme beauty and the utter tedium of life as lived by the artist--and it is good.