I am your theater.

“Another Hundred People” –Company

“Another Suitcase, Another Hall” –Evita

“As Long As He Needs Me” -Oliver

“At the Ballet” –A Chorus Line

“Being Alive” –Company

“Bill” -Showboat

“Blow Gabriel Blow” –Anything Goes

“Bosom Buddies” –Mame

“By My Side” –Godspell

“Cellblock Tango” -Chicago

“Close Every Door to Me” –Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

“Distant Melody” –Peter Pan

“Don’t Tell Mama” -Cabaret

“Easy Street” –Annie

“Far from the Home I Love” –Fiddler on the Roof

“For Good” -Wicked

“Frank Mills” –Hair

“Good Thing Going” –Merrily We Roll Along

“Heaven on Their Minds” –Jesus Christ Superstar

“How Lovely to Be a Woman” –Bye Bye Birdie

“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” –Jesus Christ Superstar

“I Know Things Now” -Into the Woods

“I Miss the Mountains” –Next to Normal

“I’ll Cover You” -Rent

“It’s All the Same” –Man of La Mancha

“Lily’s Eyes” –The Secret Garden

“Marry the Man Today” –Guys and Dolls

“Millwork” –Working

“Morning Glow” -Pippin

“My Best Girl” ­–Mame

“Not While I’m Around” –Sweeney Todd

“Our Children” -Ragtime

“Paris Original” –How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

“Simple Joys” –Pippin

“Send in the Clowns” –A Little Night Music

“Sodomy” –Hair

“Some People” -Gypsy

“Someone Else’s Story” -Chess

“Something’s Coming” –West Side Story

“Somewhere That’s Green” – Little Shop of Horrors

“Stars” –Les Miserables

“Touch Me” –Spring Awakening

“Unexpected Song” –Song & Dance

“Waiting for Life to Begin” –Once On This Island

“What I Did for Love” –A Chorus Line

“Where Is Love?” –Oliver

“Who Will Love Me As I Am?” -Sideshow

“Wig in a Box” –Hedwig and the Angry Inch

“You Gotta Get a Gimmick” -Gypsy

“You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” –South Pacific

“Chaos, control. Chaos, control. You like? You like?” –Six Degrees of Separation

            Art is about the relationship between chaos and control. This balancing act, like a ballerina on point, can be excruciating, exhilarating, and exhausting. For Nina Serres, played with ferocity by Natalie Portman, being an artist means being perfect. Unfortunately, as the film begins Nina has only mastered half of the equation—she embodies control. It is fed to her like breast milk from her manipulative mother, Barbara Hershey, whose own disappointment and resentment locks the two in a paralyzing dance of codependence. Control is technique and form, but it is also fear and frigidity. Chaos comes to town (from San Francisco of course) in the form of Lily, played effortlessly by Mila Kunis. Rounding out this outstanding female ensemble is Winona Ryder as the washed out ballerina who is forced into retirement as Nina steps into the shoes of the Swan Princess.

            Black Swan is a film about death. Director Darren Aronofsky makes the direct parallel to the ballet Swan Lake explicit in his credits, which present each character with a name from the film and the ballet. Swan Lake of course ends with the suicide of the swan princess and thus Black Swan ends with Nina’s death. Or does it? The film seems to leave many naïve viewers with puzzled looks on their faces—Is she crazy? Is it science fiction? Is it just an excuse to have a hot lesbian sex scene? These could be reasonable explanations based on Aronofsky’s prior films. While Black Swan has the paranoid delusions of Pi, the intense visualization of drugs and sex like Requiem for a Dream, and the bizarre otherworldliness of The Fountain, it is underneath the skin, a film about transformation. Nina’s shift from control to chaos, from a little girl to a diva, from the white swan into the black swan is metaphorized through a series of deaths. Nina must kill her predecessor. She must kill her rival. She must kill her mother. She must kill herself, finally to emerge transformed, and in doing so she embodies perfection and becomes an true artist. This is of course what all of us do as we leave behind the people we once were and allow new versions of ourselves to develop. We shed our skin. When we speak of growing pains this is what we mean. It is terrifying to look in the mirror and see an unfamiliar face looking back at you. When we lose ourselves during an orgasm or on the dance floor of a club we step into a void and trust that we will return to a sense of self again. Nina may present the extreme danger inherent in the void of blackness, but in her triumph she sees white.