Soft Shoe

By R.S.

THE CHILDREN OF THEATER STREET

Directed by Robert Dornhelm.

The Children of Theater Street are, in fact, the students of Leningrad's Vaganova Institute, perhaps the most distinguished school of the dance in the world (its graduates include Pavlova, Nijinsky, Balanchine, Nureyev, Makarova and Baryshnikov). This earnest documentary, which never quite gets up on point, offers a comprehensive view of the life and hard work of present-day students at the institute. Along the way there are trots through the school's history and considerable crosscutting to onstage performances by the great Kirov company, for which the school supplies dancers, and to the more experimental Maly company, also located in Leningrad. The movie is narrated by Princess Grace of Monaco, Her Highness being at her most serene and elocutionary in this role.

The film tells the story of a year in the lives of three Vaganova students--an 11-year-old girl, a 13-year-old boy and a young woman about to graduate. This is done in a straightforward, quite artless manner. There is a little spurious drama about the graduate's nervousness over her final recital, but the audience learns quickly that she really had nothing to worry about, as the Kirov had decided to accept her some time before. The picture is at its best when it shows youngsters trying out for admission to the school and when it gives some small idea of how hard they work in the course of their decade-long training program. There are also nice shots of the teachers and other function aries, living bearers of a great tradition which somehow seems to shine in their faces.

The performance footage intercut with this material is rather perfunctorily and inelegantly shot. One suspects that Soviet authorities, not wanting the world audience to get the impression that the kids are a sweated artistic proletariat, forced the documentarians to avoid any overt suggestion that there might be more pain, narrowness of intellectual focus and disappointment in the children's lives than is shown in this overly sweet film. It is assuredly a harmless way to pass a rainy weekend afternoon with one's own kids, though the commercially made and fictional The Turning Point, for all its melo drama, actually offers a truer glimpse of ballet life.

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