This breathtaking dance sequence from Anna Karenina undoubtedly entailed a tedious amount of blocking from director Joe Wright and crew. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, the film’s choreographer, describes the process of designing the elaborate, gorgeous dance as follows:

Cherkaoui set himself the task of inventing a variation on the waltz that would re-awaken it in all its allure. When he went “back into the books,” he says, “I read a lot about how the waltz was considered indecent. Not proper. It came from Poland” — a colonial outback by Russian lights — “but it seeped into the aristocracy, and people would do it because they couldn’t help themselves.

“Waltzes can be like a cosmos,” he continues, “all these couples twirling around each other but also around the other couples. You would lean in to the arm of your partner in such a way that both partners have the feeling they have no weight.” They could spin all the way to the moon. They could fly too close to the sun. That thrill and danger resounds in the waltzes of Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Ravel — and Marianelli, whose waltz for Anna and Vronsky grows progressively discordant the faster it turns.

“Anna and Vronsky’s passion is at the heart of the waltz,” Cherkaoui notes. The other couples freeze until the duo — “generating an energy like some kind of organic clockwork” — sweeps them along in its wake.  The choreographer did not meddle with the patterns of the feet — they lend the waltz its necessary force — but he embellished the arms and upper body to bring out the waltz’s strict comportment as well as its erotic appeal and to adapt it for the camera, which generally favors faces — “how people look at each other” — over feet.

As for the waltz’s legendary raciness, Cherkaoui began by thinking about the prescribed limits to touch at the 19th century ball: “You would hold the hand without the palms touching.” Only fingers were clasped. “Touching the inside of the hand was considered very intimate, very sensual.” In his version, only the lower arm’s pale undersides graze. The hands are free to undulate and unfurl like time-lapse vines winding up trellises and flowering. “The looseness of the wrist only suggests touch. The hands flow through one another like weaving. I wanted the waltz to be magical, and you know how when you cast a spell it is with the weaving of hands?” (x)

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KICK-ASS 2

Aaron Johnson and Chloë Grace Moretz don their costumes once more in the sequel to superhero movie Kick-Ass. The film, whose plot seems to be a comedic version of Watchmen, will feature some returning stars (Clark Duke and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) along with new ones (Jim Carrey) and promises more action than before. The film is slated for release August 2013. 

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