Netflix has commissioned more than ten new dance movies over the past year. The ballet-focused Dancing on Glass is the most recent, directed by Jota Linares and produced in Spain this year. So what’s the enduring appeal of ballet on screen – and is this genre in any way representative of real life?
As Joan Acocella states in her 2004 essay in The New York Review, ballet films often hold together a set of widely held assumptions about the industry, some of which are true, but threaten to homogenise the experience of ballet dancers.
