Natalie Portman went from flirty and feminine to sleek and sexy in just a matter of hours while promoting her drama miniseries “Lady in the Lake.” The actor turned heads Thursday at the New York City premiere event for the Apple TV+ series, held at the Museum of Arts and Design, in a little black ensemble from Dior ideal for a hot summer night. At its core, the outfit consisted of a black strapless corset top that cinched Portman at the waist, and matching stretchy velvet hot shorts. Over the base pieces, Portman wore a fabulous netted minidress studded with black beads all over; the piece opened in the middle at the skirt, acting like a coat and letting the shorts shine through. She held the piece up with a black belt at the waist.
The “May December” star continued the monochrome black scheme with a pair of simple strappy heels and a dramatic black smoky eye that went up to the sides like a cat eye, evoking Portman’s jet-black eye makeup in 2010’s sultry horror-mystery ballet film “Black Swan.” She also wore a tight bun, as her character does in the movie—though this time, she had some loose strands framing her face, giving the black-tie look a more casual air. For some shine, Portman put on a pair of large white diamond studs and a few diamond rings.
The all-black outfit was a complete contrast to the fit Portman wore on the carpet just a day prior, for a screening of the upcoming series at the Paley Museum. Then, she resembled a flower in bloom in an artful minidress entirely made up of cutouts that looked like graphic versions of pink azaleas.
“Lady in the Lake” is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Laura Lippman. Per IMDb, the story “takes place in ’60s Baltimore, where an unsolved murder pushes housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz (Portman) to reinvent her life as an investigative journalist and sets her on a collision course with Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram), a hardworking woman juggling motherhood, many jobs, and a passionate commitment to advancing Baltimore’s Black progressive agenda.” The first two episodes of the series will be released July 19 on Apple TV+.
Rosa Sanchez is the senior news editor at Harper’s Bazaar, working on news as it relates to entertainment, fashion, and culture. Previously, she was a news editor at ABC News and, prior to that, a managing editor of celebrity news at American Media. She has also written features for Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, Forbes, and The Hollywood Reporter, among other outlets.
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Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | February 2017 | 23 minutes (5873 words). “Perfect is boring.” — George Balanchine. I discovered I couldn’t dance when I was ten years old. My parents had signed me up for a ballet course in Toronto with a dour, shriveled Romanian teacher, chosen no doubt because of our shared totalitarian traumas. In her class I felt uncoordinated, impossibly gawky. My clearest memory is of trying to accomplish a gentle downward sweep of the hand. My teacher performed the movement. As I attempted to imitate her, she said, over and over, “but do it gracefully!” I could not figure out how to do it gracefully. I could not even see the difference between her gesture and mine. I came to the logical conclusion: I was terminally ungraceful. In fact, I couldn’t dance at all.
I quit ballet. I did have to dance again when I took part in the yearly audition held by a local school for the arts. I was terrible at acting and drawing too, but the dance test was my Waterloo. A teacher demonstrated a complicated choreography at the front of the room while we waited patiently in rows. Then he gave us a cue, and as if by magic, all of the other children repeated the combination perfectly. I, on the other hand, was a mess of arms and legs and confused desperation. I managed with twisted precision to be always facing in the opposite direction from the other kids, stumbling into them dangerously.
My inability to dance became a matter of faith, something I believed in unquestioningly for the next two decades. But I did so with pride and stubbornness. Everything about ballet felt wrong to me: all that Pepto-Bismol pink, ribbons and tulle, polished princesses executing their steps in martial unison, tight little buns behind tight little faces. Ballet represented hard beauty, ungenerous towards human flaws or quirks. It was a tyranny of perfection.
Family wisdom gave me other ideas. My great-uncle was a man of taste who surrounded himself with exquisite objects and gorgeous women, so we tended to take his aesthetic pronouncements seriously. One such nugget was that beauty requires a flaw. Perfection, he said, can never be truly beautiful. A slight asymmetry, a birth mark, a disproportion or scar — these are necessary to make the merely lovely transcendent.
I think about this idea often. It is an unpopular one, I suspect. In high school we learned that evolutionary biologists have proven that men find symmetrical women more attractive. Calculating your appeal to the opposite sex is as simple as measuring the circumference of your forearms and working out the differential. If your eyes are equally wide and your arms equally bulky or slim, you are due for reproductive success. Evolutionary biologists never study the enchanting quality of a mole or aquiline nose. From our early days we are brought up to admire perfection, or someone’s notion of it: to worship the smooth, the straight, and the slim.
No art form embodies these ideals as immaculately — or as rigidly — as ballet. No art form is as relentless in its requirements: youth, flexible joints, arched feet, a thin neck and small head, long legs that can be made strong without becoming muscular, to say nothing of coordination, musicality, discipline, and a tolerance for suffering. For much of my life, I hated everything ballet stood for, resented its unyielding standards and rose-dusted femininity. Taking ballet as a child had, after all, convinced me I would never be even a passable dancer. I was angry, too, that the ideals of womanhood that dominated my youth were, at their core, ballerina aesthetics: fragility, lightness, biddable mystery. It was a measure I would never meet and didn’t particularly want to. But it still smarted that I couldn’t.
“[T]he Academicians saw in ballet a chance to take man’s troublesome passions and physical desires and redirect them toward a transcendent love of God. The body had long been seen as pulling man down, sacrificing his higher spiritual powers to material needs…. But if he danced, so the men of the Academy believed, man might break some of these earthly ties and raise himself up, closer to the angels.” — Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet
Ballet was born in the French and Italian courts of the Renaissance, and its high idealism reflects these noble origins. It was not a professional dance yet in those days, and did not require the rigorous technical proficiency — the speed, jumps, and pointe work — we associate with the art today, but it was an elite dance nevertheless. Kings Louis XIII and XIV both danced avidly, and both appeared in politically symbolic roles like the sun or the god Apollo. Their ballet was a dance of rationality, order, and power — masculine power. It was in the nineteenth century, with the rise of Romanticism and the increasing dominance of the ballerina, that a different, hyper-feminine ideal redefined the dance. Ballerinas such as Marie Taglioni trained hard to look effortlessly buoyant, and the creatures they represented on stage often had no weight at all. Wearing diaphanous white tutus, they transformed into sylphs, water sprites, ghosts, and fairies.
Whether danced by men or women, ballet has always been trying to leave the ground. And yet there have always been other strains too, earthbound urges in the dance. As a teenager frustrated with the expectation that women be inconsequential, I struggled against what I thought of as the preciousness of ballerinas. Now I think of ballet as a tension between Apollo and Dionysus, gods of reason and abandon, or — not to put too fine a point on it — between Odette and Odile, the white swan and the black. At least since it became an art practiced by professionals in need of money rather than enacting court propaganda, ballet has had a seamy side. There is an ancient assumption that women who display their bodies on stage will make themselves available for a price behind the scenes as well, and this was often true of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballerinas. Some, like the eighteenth-century French dancer Marie-Madeleine Guimard, made the best of a bad situation, gathering aristocratic and ecclesiastical lovers and even opening pornographic theatres in pre-revolutionary Paris.
In the nineteenth century as a whole, however, the lives of ballerinas became shabbier and sadder. In her book “Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection,” Deirdre Kelly describes how the Paris Opéra served as an elegant brothel. Members of the Jockey Club of Paris treated the members of the ballet corps as playthings, and at the end of the century, the Opéra allowed male patrons to observe, flirt with, and hound ballerinas in an open rehearsal studio, the foyer de la danse. Dancers, who were generally from a poor background, were encouraged to be friendly to patrons, but left to their own devices if they became pregnant. Ballet has a cleaner reputation now, possibly because most dancers are supported by wealthy families who can afford expensive lessons, pointe shoes, and summer intensives. Still there are occasional glimpses of a sordid past. The Russian prima ballerina Anastasia Volochkova was fired from the Bolshoi in 2003; a decade later, she accused the Ballet of expecting its dancers to sleep with wealthy patrons and oligarchs: “The Bolshoi general director has turned the Bolshoi theatre into a giant brothel.”
The Dionysian quality of ballet appears in other, more refined forms as well. The legendary choreographer George Balanchine idealized women, but also had earthly desires for the dancers who inspired him. “When they get heated up, to put nose in certain places when they do exercise,” he was quoted as saying, “odor wafts out and it’s natural, it’s natural. This I like.” Not only did he marry four ballerinas and engage in a long-term relationship with a fifth, but his aggressive pursuit of his most famous muse, Suzanne Farrell (forty-one years his junior), provoked jealousy among the New York City Ballet’s other dancers and ultimately drove her out of the country for half a decade. Farrell committed the forgivable sin of denying Balanchine his choreographer’s droit de seigneur and marrying a man her age instead. Her husband, Paul Mejia, later demonstrated how well he had learned his master’s lessons by having his own affairs with dancers and embroiling the Fort Worth Dallas Ballet, of which he was artistic director, in a sexual harassment scandal.
Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper-development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood.
It was Balanchine’s choreography that made me fall in love with ballet in my twenties, though not for its idealization of the female form. Sometime around 2006, I let a friend drag me to the New York City Ballet. I had developed a decent, financially manageable taste for opera, and every few months I would take the train into the city with her to worship whatever gods the Met had on offer. Trusting her to know what’s good, I took a chance on the City Ballet, even though I secretly dreaded the tutus and unrelenting prettiness. But what I saw on that stage was modern, angular, fierce. Leg lines were broken, costumes were stark and geometric, athleticism was at the fore. A pas de deux was the most erotic thing I had ever seen between two people. Unlike at the opera, where even moments of unreal beauty are liable to be destroyed by a well-heeled patron intent on slowly unwrapping candy or toying mindlessly with her many bangles, the ballet audience was transfixed. We had all taken a breath in, and we were not going to exhale until the thing that was blowing our minds was over.
That evening it clicked for me. I loved opera because of its freakish achievement: singing that way required years of honing a set of otherwise-useless faculties until they became more than human, and thus inhuman. I was, at the time, in the middle of a PhD program, another method of training a small muscle to make it bulge in a way I considered beautiful and others thought perverse. Ballet, like opera, is wonderful because it is monstrous, the hyper-development of skills nobody needs, a twisting of human bodies and souls into impossible positions, the purchase of light with blood.
My childhood experience of ballet had convinced me I had two left feet, but over the years I found myself drawn to dance despite the feeling of inadequacy it inevitably awakened in me. In an Arthur Murray studio tucked in the corner of a suburban Toronto strip mall, I learned the basics of ballroom, and when my affectless teacher told me my hips had “Latin motion” I savored the compliment even though I knew he was fishing for long-term customers. I dragged my high school friends to the naval veterans’ club for free swing lessons and booze-free parties with the over-seventy set. I learned the basics of salsa and Lindy Hop on the crowded dance floors of overheated Montreal nightclubs. I made several half-hearted attempts at learning Argentine tango, breathtakingly intense the few times I clicked with a partner, painfully awkward and lonely otherwise.
But the dance that stuck was the polar opposite of ballet. Bellydance was sensual and grounded instead of light and ethereal. Its movements were round and fluid, but danced to heavy beats. It was also flashy, unafraid of sequins and beads and coins and the occasional neon animal print on shiny stretch fabric. It nourished my inner East European drag queen, kept me away from the bad breath and plodding steps of dance partners, and best of all, it was a dance I could learn as an adult with the hope of achieving some proficiency. And that was the problem with it too. As I took more lessons, practiced at home, and discovered I had a flicker of talent, I became frustrated with myself for my remaining limitations. Instead of focusing on the sheer pleasure of embodying music I loved, I noticed flaws: poor posture, wayward spins, bent legs in arabesque. Despite its roots in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean, oriental dance has been influenced by ballet in multiple ways. I recognized that the technique I lacked was precisely what ballet taught best.
So it happened that, years after discovering the ferocious beauty of ballet on stage, I finally stepped into a studio to try it myself. And now, as an adult, I dance. Once or twice a week I go to a little dance school near my office in Bonn, squeeze myself into a leotard, cover up my life experience with a few extra layers of clothing, and take a place at the barre. My knees crack like they’re bending for the first time, my hair falls out of its makeshift bun by the second combination, I struggle to lift my legs or maintain a simple balance. And I adore every moment, despite the frequent frustrations, despite an
