Ruth Leon recommends… The Carioca – Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
Ruth Leon recommendsThe Carioca – Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
So many contenders for the ‘best dance routine ever filmed’ that I’ve had to make a special file for readers’ choices.
Here’s this week’s entry, Fred and Ginger (“Everything he did, I did backwards, in heels”) in their first movie together, Flying Down to Rio (1933). Here’s the Carioca, foreheads firmly pressed together. I can’t imagine how hard it was for them to dance with their heads together like that, in such an unnatural position.
It was said that he would work on their dances alone while she, at the time a bigger star, was filming elsewhere. Then she would arrive on the set, in costume and make-up, he would show her the steps, once, and then the cameras rolled.
Magic, yes, but I’m amazed all over again by how incredibly precise and disciplined they were and how easy they made it look.
“It was said that he would work on their dances alone while she, at the time a bigger star, was filming elsewhere. Then she would arrive on the set, in costume and make-up, he would show her the steps, once, and then the cameras rolled.”
Ridiculous! I would like to know the source for this completely absurd statement.
The reason that Rogers and Astaire looked so “precise and disciplined” is that they intensively rehearsed the dances TOGETHER, over and over again, until the routines were polished to Fred’s satisfaction – and Fred was (obviously) a perfectionist.
Rogers and Astaire were brilliant and beautiful. Their dancing was peerless. Ginger Rogers, in my opinion and that of many others, was Fred’s greatest screen partner. The chemistry they had was absolutely electric.
By the way, “Flying Down to Rio”, apart from that exquisite dance number, was a very funny film. It was Fred and Ginger’s first film together, and in it they danced only one number – “The Carioca”.
This film was also the first collaboration of Astaire with Hermes Pan, the brilliant choreographer, who went on to work with Fred for the rest of their careers.
Ginger Rogers was a wonderful dancer, but the fact is that Astaire made everyone he danced with (including a hat rack and a wall & ceiling) look really good.
George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins were on record as saying that Astaire was the greatest American dancer, period.
Balanchine [Quoted by Terry Teachout]: “He is like Bach, who in his time had a great concentration of ability, essence, knowledge, a spread of music. Astaire has that same concentration of genius; there is so much of the dance in him that it has been distilled.”
[From the New York Times:] Robbins made a 30-minute ballet (“I’m Old Fashioned”) inspired by a single dance routine by Astaire and Rita Hayworth in the movie “You Were Never Lovelier”.
”Astaire’s dancing,” [Robbins] said, ”looks so simple, so disarming, so easy.” Yet when he met with Sara Leland and Bart Cook, two of the New York City Ballet’s assistant ballet masters, to analyze a videotape of the duet, they found that, after 12 hours of study, they still had not noted all of its details. What made the sequence complex, Mr. Robbins said, was not necessarily the steps themselves but ”the way Astaire set the steps on, over or against the music.”
“When asked what ballet dancers could learn from Mr. Astaire, Mr. Robbins beamed and said, ”Everything.” He added that to examine any of Mr. Astaire’s dances closely is to be amazed because ”the understructure is so surprising and inventive. I can see more and more why Mr. Balanchine thought Astaire so wonderful.”
Ginger Rogers in her autobiography wrote that the dance routines with Astaire were rehearsed meticulously over weeks and often gave her bloody feet.