• Director(s):

    LEMAIRE (OLIVIER)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTE FRANCE, AGAT FILMS ET CIE

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2013

  • Language(s):

    German, English, French, Portuguese

  • Rights:

    TV, DVD, NON-THEATRICAL, INTERNET, VOD

The final part is devoted to unusual body types. Dance hasn’t always been reserved for perfect, high-performing and athletic bodies. Over the last century, as the body has achieved its current-day importance, dance has constantly questioned our relationship to the body.

To the norms and ideals that define beauty and ugliness. From the beginning, it has put men and women on stage who fall outside those norms. Dance shows us a distorted view of ourselves. The classical dancer’s body might be considered the physical manifestation of an objective and universal ideal. We call perfect or ideal a body that is slender, muscular, toned and healthy—in other words, more or less the archetype of the Russian dancer present in ballet troupes and dance companies the world over. But even if these conventions remain the epitome of the ideal body, during the 20th century, other bodies began dancing: the overweight, the very young or old, the physically disabled, transsexual, stunted, maimed, disfigured, disguised… This film will try to trace the history of these unusual body types, to implicitly address society’s relationship with them and the ways it does or does not accept them. A history of changing standards of beauty throughout the 20th century as told through dance.