Chapter & Verse

MONTAGE Left: Fox Music president Robert Kraft, at the piano, works with film director Darren ICTURES P Aronofsky. Above: Aronofsky directing Cas- sel on the ballet-studio set. RCHLIGHT A E S N it at the elite level. Every small gesture has OX OX F CY ALLE CY to be so specific and so full of lightness ISE / N AN N and grace.” VER At the start of the film, Nina is a “bun- Ta Nina must endure a personal purgatory to claim head”—dancers’ unflattering term for a NIKO ballerina so obsessively devoted to her the dark side of the role and of her personality. art that she has no life outside it. A Signet Society member and psychology concen- the same,” Aronofsky explains. “Mickey she danced 90 percent of the film’s ballet trator at Harvard, Portman saw Nina as Rourke as a wrestler was going through scenes herself. (American Ballet Theatre “being caught in a cycle of obsession and something very similar to Natalie Portman soloist Sarah Lane performed some exact- compulsion. The positive side of that for as a ballerina. They’re both artists who ing point work and turns as Portman’s artists and dancers is that by focusing so use their bodies to express themselves double.) “It’s incredibly challenging, try- hard you can become a virtuoso, but then and they’re both threatened by physical ing to pick up ballet at 28,” Portman says. there’s a much darker side, an unhealthy injury, because their bodies are the only “Even if you’ve taken dance lessons before, side, in which you can become completely tools they have for expression. What was you just don’t realize how much goes into lost. That’s where I had to take Nina.” interesting for me was to find these two connected stories in what might appear to be unconnected worlds.” In Black Swan, C hapter & Verse “We wanted to be tense, and to make a thriller,” he explains. “To have the horrific Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words elements contrasting with the beauty and sexuality of ballet made for an interesting construction.” J.P. Akins requests the complete text “…easier to imagine the weather put- Long before the screenplay was ready, of a poem he remembers from his youth ting something off because of Miss ….” Aronofsky had decided that Portman was about the Harvard-Yale game and the way “…like one of the seven deadly sins the right actress for the lead. The two had it “releases us, changed and changeless, wrapped up in the cloak of the other six.” met for coffee in Times Square more than into the November evening. ” He thinks “Alas, we would no longer be able to 10 years ago to talk about the idea. Port- it may be the work of the late David Mc- listen to the music of Mozart.” man studied ballet as a child and has con- Cord ’21, L.H.D. ’56. “Cynicism is the fruit of disappointed tinued to dance to stay in shape; she told hopes that were never well justified to the director that she had always wanted From our archives, here are more as- begin with.” to play a dancer. To prepare for the film, yet-unsourced phrases and aphorisms, in “Lust is the lamp that lifts the gloom./ she undertook 10 months of intense physi- hopes that a reappearance, in print and Lust is the light that fills the room.” cal training that consumed five hours a online, will yield identifications. day, including swimming, weight lifting, “Whereas the music of Beethoven as- Send inquiries and answers to Chap- and other cross-training, as well as in- pires to heaven, the music of Mozart was ter and Verse, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware tensive dance work with choreographer written from there.” Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to Benjamin Millepied, a principal dancer “…and rain, that graybeard sing….” [email protected]. with the New York City Ballet; in the end, 14 January - February 2011.

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