As part of the birthday celebration for my dear friend, a group of us went to the ballet to see the Moscow Ballet Company perform Swan Lake.
(from www.virginiaartsfest.com)It was a fantastic performance. I've only seen ballet on PBS, so I was extremely excited to see one live... especially one as accessible as Swan Lake. This ballet has that sort of Nutcracker appeal of one being able to follow a specific, simple story without words. There's a prince, he meets an enchanted swan, who is the queen of her enchanted flock. They fall in love, he makes a promise he must keep. If he breaks the promise, the enchanted ladies will be swans forever. He goes home, his mother has lined up princesses from all over the world to meet him. He is asked to pick a bride, but he has given his heart to the Swan Queen and refuses them all. An evil sorcerer disguises his daughter as the Swan Queen tricking the prince into breaking his promise. Still, true love saves the day (it's not clear how exactly, but the dances are elaborate and pretty) and the prince and the Swan Queen live happily ever...
...well, you get the gist.
The Prince was a magnificent dancer. I've never seen a man so light on his feet when he's carrying that much bulk on top. Some of the ladies landed harder on the boards of the stage than he did. The Jester was also quiet impressive. There's so much to make an audience just lose it while enjoying his performance... lots of multiple turns on one foot (makes my muscles ache just thinking about it)...
...speaking of the audience, Holy Cow...
I can easily say that I have never attended an event that had a ruder audience. Some of that was innocent... there were several young, young children in the audience. I suppose if you're going to expose little ones to a ballet, this is the one to introduce to them first. Still, there were many moments of parents escorting children in and out of the aisles for bathroom breaks or who knows what else... I heard a mother not sitting in the balcony with our group loudly shushing a child who was gibbering out loud.
And yet, the children are hardly to blame. The adults in the audience were the most appalling from the woman loudly saying, "SHUSH!" rather than taking her child out of the theater to the woman sitting right next to us. A gentleman ten seats down from us kept looking over at this lady who was hacking repeatedly over her crinkling bag of M&Ms. I don't mean she coughed here and there like a normal person with a tickle... minutes were spent listening to her hack and sniff and pump her sinus medication. Why she didn't just get up and find a water fountain still sends a puff of smoke out from my ears ("Fume, fume, fume!").
While that was unfortunate, as I mentioned before this tirade, it was truly an impressive performance. The ladies were extraordinary and the lead ballerinas were the objects of our childhood fantasies and images of womanhood... so wispy, light, and graceful. I'm glad I went... and I'm glad that, if I had to sit through a performance with an audience like that one, I had some of my dearest friends with me with whom to laugh about it afterward...
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