Étoile

The Swap / The Bull

Season 1

Episodes 1 – 2

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

****

Amy Sherman-Palladino’s latest series gleefully dives into the world of professional ballet without shying away from the harsh economic realities.
Photo: Philippe Antonello/Prime Video

“Dancing is discipline; expression is openness!” A ballet teacher shouts to a studio full of children as they jump around and make silly faces. Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby), the executive director of New York City’s Metropolitan Ballet Theater (MBT), watches as the teacher then instructs them to “be little,” and they all shrink down like faithful subjects bowing to their king. Seconds later, they tackle “Mr. Jack” to the ground.

Prime Video’s Étoile, created by The Marvelous Mrs. Maiselteam of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, explores the professional ballet world from a variety of different angles, but this short scene in the dance studio illuminates its most visceral ideas: the tension between the freedom of artistic expression and the discipline needed to hone a craft; the ways that authority figures can diminish individuality in pursuit of institutional goals; and how the pressures of running an arts organization can take down its leaders.

This scene also functions as a bridge between Étoile (the French term for a principal dancer)and Amy Sherman-Palladino’s previous ballet-centric series, the delightful and sadly short-lived Bunheads, which starred Sutton Foster as a Vegas showgirl who pivots her career to teach young ballet dancers in a quirky small town on the West Coast. Étoile doesn’t just move the action to the high-stakes world of a leading New York City ballet company — it straddles both sides of the Atlantic to incorporate a Parisian perspective as well, bringing two companies together for an audacious marketing scheme to not only save themselves, but an entire art form desperate to gain a new audience.

Many of the struggles faced by MBT and Paris’ Le Ballet National (LBN), fictional analogs for real–world companies, are not unique to the dance world. Audiences and funding are dying, with digital media monopolizing younger demographics. Labor issues have intensified, and the disruption caused by the pandemic has left long-lasting wounds. One of Étoile’s greatest strengths is how it positions a ballet company as a workplace like any other, albeit one that is especially concerned with how much its employees are eating.

In typical Sherman-Palladino fashion, these workplaces are full of bold personalities whose dedication to their personal ideologies creates a lot of friction that fuels the comedy. There’s Kirby’s wiry, high-strung Jack, who doesn’t want to deal with mandatory HR training and is looking for any opportunity to cut costs. His French counterpart, Geneviève Lavigne (Charlotte Gainsbourg), has a more relaxed composure, but she’s just as worried about the state of their business and is willing to make moral compromises to secure funding. Their professional relationship is complicated by a past affair that ended Geneviève’s marriage, and Jack still holds a candle for her based on his attempts to get close on a nightclub dance floor, which she swiftly rebukes.

Geneviève is the one who comes to Jack with the marketing campaign to bring back audiences and put out fresh faces, proposing that they swap their top talent for a year. Geneviève has no problem letting go of her dancers and conductor while Jack fights every one of her recommendations, which include a former LBN student, Mishi Duplessis (Taïs Vinolo), and MBT’s star choreographer, Tobias Bell (Gideon Glick). Geneviève only objects when Jack asks for LBN’s étoile, Cheyenne Toussaint (Lou de Laâge), a firebrand who had a tumultuous stint as a guest artist at MBT and may have been romantically involved with Jack as well.

Cheyenne is a radical eco-warrior with a brash, hostile demeanor, and she’s introduced on the deck of a boat with a group of environment activists clashing with an illegal fishing operation. The chaos of the sea is a reflection of Cheyenne’s wild spirit, and she ends up in jail because of the danger she posed to her fellow activists. When Cheyenne finds out about being traded to MBT, she storms Geneviève’s office, reeking from her time at sea, a great touch that makes every person have a strong physical reaction to her presence, reinforcing the abrasive aura that Lou de Laâge radiates in her performance. Cheyenne has the most compelling backstory of all the characters, and the glimpses of her mother sharing a phone with her neighbor and using a homemade toaster offer hints of the humble upbringing that shaped Cheyenne’s anticapitalist beliefs.

Cheyenne’s political views put her in direct conflict with the funder of this entire project: “soil-raper” Crispin Shamblee (Simon Callow), an egomaniac who believes that funding art is his way of righting the litany of wrongs he has committed to gain his wealth. Crispin wears a mask of British whimsy, but he drops it when addressing Jack’s refusal to accept any of his past charitable contributions. “I’m not used to that,” Crispin says with icy resentment, and Callow does excellent work bringing an undercurrent of menace to Crispin’s genuine appreciation for ballet and his desire to see it thrive. Crispin and Cheyenne have a heated exchange when they meet on the MBT stage, and all of Crispin’s rationalizing about funding as penance ultimately means nothing once he reveals that she was attacking his boat.

Étoile is as much about the money as it is about the art, and while first episode “The Swap” has its fair share of musings about the nature of being an artist, the story’s depth comes from its examination of the financial investment that is put into dance. The economic struggles of the organization are the driving force of the plot, but incorporating the financial burden placed on the dancers gives the series a human touch that helps make this seemingly elitist profession more relatable.

Being a professional ballet dancer is expensive, and the economic inequality built into the profession is put front and center in Étoile’s very first scene. After a series of shots showing the empty MBT facility at night, we meet SuSu (LaMay Zhang), a young girl who practices in the empty ballet studio while her mother cleans. SuSu’s mother sets up her phone to record classes during the day because she can’t afford to enroll her daughter, and SuSu borrows pairs of pointe shoes that are left in the studio. Cheyenne catches SuSu practicing at the end of the first episode, and she’s impressed by SuSu’s feet and her skill level, given a lack of hands-on training. In the second episode, “The Bull,” Cheyenne gifts her a pair of new pointe shoes with SuSu’s name written on the bottom. It’s a tender moment that suggests these two will go on their own Bunheads-coded journey, with Cheyenne finding the spiritual fulfillment she’s lacking by helping SuSu reach her full potential.

The cost of shoes comes up multiple times in “The Swap,” including a subtle but telling exchange between two dancers. One is offering tips on how to wash blood out of the fabric with baking soda or bleach, and when the other says that it’s easier to just buy a new pair, she responds that they are backordered and the shipment is late. This could be taken at face value, but the subtext is that these dancers have two different financial situations: one has to put in extra work at home to have the proper work attire, and the other can just drop more money to solve the problem. This isn’t just an American issue. The Parisian dancers are on the verge of a strike, and their last request is that they be reimbursed for the thread they have to buy to sew ribbons on their toe shoes.

The second episode of Étoile sees the traded talent settling into their new surroundings, and it’s a less focused chapter than the first. Jack comes across as a bumbling fool in a live TV interview about the trade, discussing the physical attraction of his dancers in a way that is very clueless for someone in his role. He may not have done his HR training, but it’s hard to imagine someone getting to his position without knowing that he shouldn’t be actively horny on camera.

Meanwhile, Geneviève faces the fallout of losing French national treasure Cheyenne, tries to wrangle the extremely obstinate Tobias, and deals with behind-the-scenes drama involving a bull for an upcoming opera production, a symbol for Shamblee and the ways that his involvement introduces unforeseen complications. During a joint press conference for the two companies, Shamblee hijacks the camera feed like a supervillain, announcing that he has the official position of “Chief of Getting Fun Stuff Done” and introducing his friend Pink (is that actually Pink’s voice?) to share her excitement about the campaign. By the end of the press conference, the bull is in front of the cameras, drawing the attention that should go to the dance companies.

Cheyenne’s aggression becomes even more cartoonish in “The Bull” as she shuts down male dance partners by telling a story about her mother killing a man in the village she grew up in. Displeased with the current company, Cheyenne searches for a new partner (with the help of Didi Conn, Grease’s Frenchy). She finds one in Gael (David Alvarez), a former MBT dancer who now works for a farm. Gael has no interest in going back, but he’s forced to when Cheyenne announces that he will be her partner during the press conference.

The second episode is a big one for Mishi, revealing that she’s the daughter of France’s Minister of Culture, who helped orchestrate the campaign to bring her home. Mishi is immediately alienated by both her parents and her peers. Her parents are too preoccupied with themselves to notice that Mishi is uncomfortable with every aspect of being home, a feeling that is exacerbated by the reception she gets at work, where the other dancers look down on her for being cut and ending up in New York City.

Étoile is full of ballet Easter eggs, from the recreation of Henry Leutwyler’s photograph of a ballet dancer’s feet in the opening credits to the cadre of professional dancers in the cast. Tiler Peck, a current principal dancer for New York City Ballet, has a recurring role as Eva, a company member making her way back to the stage after wandering thoughts about her laundry and the military service of BTS members causes a multi-dancer pileup during act two of Swan Lake. Robbie Fairchild, a former New York City Ballet principal and Munkustrap in the Cats movie, also recurs as Larry, the first male dancer to suffer the wrath of the returned Cheyenne.

The creative team’s passion for ballet shines bright in these first two episodes, particularly in the dance sequences that showcase both the athleticism and emotion of ballet performance. Choreographed by Marguerite Derricks, the numbers on stage highlight the lifts, leaps, and fouetté turns that make audiences burst out in applause, but there are also spontaneous performances from the characters that help flesh out their personalities.

Frustrated with the execution of his current piece, Tobias (dance double Maxwell Dennis Simoes) takes to the street, where he holds up traffic by performing West Side Story–esque steps in the middle of a crosswalk because he’s fundamentally inconsiderate of others. Cheyenne (dance double Constance Devernay) lets out her anger at being traded by improvising in the studio, interacting with the environment to show how she takes control of a space when she’s dancing. Amy Sherman-Palladino films these performances with long, uninterrupted takes that show the dancers’ entire bodies, which helps the viewer feel the full momentum of a phrase. The dance sequences are where Étoile becomes a true advocate for the art form, and hopefully the show will inspire its audience to seek out professional dance in the real world.