Degas and the Dance

A film by Mischa Scorer

Peabody Award - 63rd annual Peabody Awards- Athens/USA, 2004

Golden Eagle Award - CINE Festival, USA, 2004

Edgar Degas' paintings of the ballet are amongst the most loved and popular works of art in the world. Reproduced on a thousand chocolate boxes, any of them easy on the eye and superficially glamorous. And yet at the time he was painting, many of these pictures were considered outrageous and dangerous. They showed the reality of life in the world of ballet in Paris in the second half of the nineteenth century at a time when paintings were expected to be idealised visions. A major exhibition of more than 100 works has been assembled and opens in United States in October 2002. It will overturn the stereotypical image of Degas as a painter of ballet scenes that are just pretty.

This 60 minute film draws on much of the painstaking research done for the exhibition by its two curators, Richard Kendall and Jill de Vonyar, and makes use of unprecedented access to the building and the archives of the Palais Garnier - the home of the Opéra de Paris, opened in 1875 when Degas was in his 30's and where he spent much of his time for the next ten or twenty years.