Dancing with the tutus and tantrums

Fairfax

TUTUS: TV3's new series The Secret Lives of Dancers on Tuesday nights turns out not to be either Survivors: Coppelia or New Zealand's Next Dying Swan Idol, writes Jane Clifton.

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OPINION: Reality TV meets classical ballet - is nothing sacred?

Fortunately, TV3's new series The Secret Lives of Dancers on Tuesday nights turns out not to be either Survivors: Coppelia or New Zealand's Next Dying Swan Idol.

It's a devastatingly honest fly- on-the-wall documentary about the New Zealand Ballet Company, one which would give even a casual watcher new respect for the career dancer.

The fascinating thing about ballet for the lay person is that it does things with the human body that the body was never designed to do in even the dimmest vestiges of human evolution, yet the contortions look beautiful. To enable this super-human movement, dancers have to have both discipline and muscles of iron.

As is now generally appreciated, it's hard physical work.

Dancers train harder and for longer than most sports people. A man in tights could give Richie McCaw a run for his money in both strength and stamina.

And as for dancers all being anorexic or gay . . . Australian dancer Martin tells the invisible interviewer that even when he was a schoolboy, his friends soon revised their prejudices about dancers being fairies when they clocked how high he could jump, and what privileged access he got to beautiful young girls "wearing not very much!"

The first intimation of how damn tough this company is comes from the demeanour of the company manager, Gary Harris. He is great television talent, but you wouldn't want to be on the other end of his flurry of disparaging comments.

Auditioning 20 aspiring new company members, all heartbreakingly young and starry- eyed, he is almost brutal.

He tells them that if he singles any of them out after the audition class, then "we'll have a talk", but if not, that's it, the end, good bye. No there-there's, no "you've got lots of potential". Just a casual no.

You could get quite a downer on this guy, genial as he is. As the hopefuls waft and pirouette for him as though their lives depended on it, he's intoning in a Frankie Howerd falsetto, "'Orrible arms! Oooh! Oooh! Stoppit! What's wrong with her left foot? Noooh, make it stoooop!"

Finally it does stop and two talented waifs are chosen. One is Yang Liu from the National Ballet of China, no less. She dances like a little sprite in a romantic Disney cartoon. You can't take your eyes off her.

And that's one of the revelations in episode one: that dancers come from overseas to audition each year, even from much bigger, flasher ballet companies than ours.

And most of them fail.

It's been several years since anyone new, local or foreign, has been accepted into the company.

On the contrary, as a Melbourne Ballet Company member auditions, Harris squawks: "Isn't it amazing, being a member of a major company and not being able to do a double pirouette? It's amazing how many dancers have an exaggerated opinion about themselves".

One suspects that even tougher than the physical workload of a dancer is the emotional toll such criticism could take. There's another physical attribute the dancer must hone: the hide of a rhino.

Luckily, Yang's command of English seems too halting for her yet to detect the ambient sarcasm. Though it may be worse where she comes from. "In China dancing is very strict," Yang says shyly. "I want to dance in New Zealand Ballet more freely!"

In the famously full-on Chinese way, Yang has been studying dancing fulltime, away from her small-town family, since she was talent-scouted by the authorities at 10 years old.

This is going to be a worthwhile half hour of telly as the cameras follow the dancers mounting productions under the tender mercies of Harris's ongoing narrative.

As if the hypnotically beautiful sight of the company practising and performing is not enough, we are promised spice, in the form of love affairs, and the inevitable crumpled tutus of the cliches - tantrums and sulks.

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