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Tuesday March 29, 2011 1:19 am

Natalie Portman Dance War Continues




Posted by K.C. Morgan Categories: Movies, Rivalries, Rumors,

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Looks like we’re going to have to settle this one on reality TV. Otherwise, this back-and-forth in the media just may never end. The debate over just how much of her own dancing Natalie Portman did in the highly-touted, Oscar-winning flick Black Swan continues, and now almost everyone has weighed in.

Fox Searchlight Films released a recent statement extolling their lead actress’s dancing virtues, saying “We were fortunate to have Sarah [Lane, professional ballet dancer] there to cover the more complicated dance sequences, and we have nothing but praise for the hard work she did. However, Natalie [Portman] herself did most of the dancing featured in the final film.”

Read More | Huffington Post

Last Friday, Sarah Lane gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly saying that Portman did very little ballet dancing in the flick, despite all the media hype of her hard-earned abilities. “They wanted to create this idea in people’s minds that Natalie was some kind of prodigy, or so gifted in dance, and really worked so hard to make herself a ballerina in a year and a half for the movie, basically because of the Oscar,” she accused. “It is demeaning to the profession and not just to me. I’ve been doing this for 22 years.”

Days earlier, Portman’s husband-to-be and baby daddy Benjamin Millepied has extolled the star’s dancing, saying “Honestly, 85% of that movie is Natalie.” He says Lane “just did the footwork, and the fouettes, and one diagonal in the studio.”

Lane says Portman “doesn’t look like a professional ballet dancer at all and she can’t dance in pointe shoes. And she can’t move her body; she’s very stiff.”

The actress’s second body double, Kimberly Prosa, had a different opinion in an interview she gave to the Huffington Post. “She studied for several months,” she said of Portman, adding “from the waist up is her.”

Prosa even mentioned Lane in the Q & A, though it was conducted weeks before the dancer went public with her displeasure. “Sarah Lane, a soloist at ABT, did the heavy tricks, she did the fouettes, but they only had her for a limited time, a couple of weeks, so I did the rest of whatever dance shots they needed.” Prosa added that Portman “definitely put her work in. Just in a couple of months, she looked credible -- all the dancers on the set were really impressed at how well she pulled that off.”

Lane claims that she has been the victim of a “cover-up.” “Of the full body shots, I would say 5% of are Natalie,” she said in her in-depth interview. But, it wasn’t all negative. “I do give her a lot of credit because in a year and a half she lost a lot of weight and she really tried to go method and get into a dancer’s head and really feel like a ballet dancer.” Lane added, “I know that it’s just a political thing. It’s just unfortunate that I kind of lost credit.”

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