Frederick Wiseman offers an immersive look at American Ballet Theatre, capturing the tense process where artistry, discipline, and organizational effort converge. Behind elegant performances lie arduous rehearsals where dancers and choreographers coordinate intricate movements through creative exchanges and ballet masters' guidance. Wiseman also illuminates behind-the-scenes areas—administration, fundraising, and international tours—revealing how artistic ambition balances with demands of maintaining cultural status. The film exposes rigorous discipline required to sustain this classical institution's excellence.

Frederick Wiseman’s Ballet follows the American Ballet Theatre from rehearsal studios in New York to touring performances in Athens and Copenhagen. The film moves fluidly between the artistic and administrative sides of the company—capturing the daily discipline of young dancers, collaborations among choreographers, and the behind-the-scenes work of fundraising and management. 

Along the way, moments of leisure reveal the dancers as ordinary young people outside the studio. But once the lights dim and the curtain rises, they transform. Wiseman’s fascination with the physical expression of classical grace is evident throughout, but the final hour is where the film truly soars: a sustained, unsentimental record of pure performance, where the elegance of movement speaks entirely for itself. Ballet is both a portrait of an elite company and a meditation on the transformative power of art—a testament to how human bodies, shaped by years of unrelenting rigor, can make an ancient ideal of beauty breathtakingly present.

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• ProducerFrederick WISEMAN
• Cinematography John DAVEY
• Edit Frederick WISEMAN
• Sound Frederick WISEMAN

Zipporah Films​​