skygiants

genarti got us season tickets to the ballet this year, and the last of this year's performances was last night. I honestly know very little about ballet except what I have gleaned from the anime Princess Tutu so these are only going to be the briefest notes of things that struck me from this season, but I will not remember what I have seen unless I note it, so here goes:

Fall Experience: I missed it! this is just a note to myself in case I ever ask, what did I think of the 2023 Fall Experience? well, I didn't.

Winter Experience: long enough ago that I don't remember it well at this point but I also don't think I found it very memorable generally; the first half was a couple of pieces by Helen Pickett and the second half was Mikko Nissenen's reimagining (and shortening) of the classic ballet Raymonda. The Pickett pieces I think were both pretty but were also both set to the very floaty kind of synth music that unfortunately immediately makes me start getting sleepy .... then what I remember best about the Raymonda was one part where a couple came out and danced a mazurka of some sort and were IMMEDIATELY and visibly having so much more fun than everyone else that it woke me all the way up.

Cinderella: fun and goofy and a good time but by far the most notable part of this ballet is the fact that Napoleon? and Wellington?? are there during Cindrella's ball??? Wellington is very prim and Napoleon is the shortest dancer in the troupe; there's some wig-related comedy; each of them is cajoled into dancing with a stepsister and then one stepsister just picks Napoleon up and carries him off stage, never to be seen again. Apparently this has been an established Bit in Ashton's Cinderella choreography for decades. Extremely funny, raises many questions, what are the implications of the events of Cinderella for the Napoleonic Wars?

Carmen: This was prefigured by a performance of Kingdom of the Shades, a ghost sequence by Florence Clerc after Marius Petipa, from the classical ballet La Bayadère, with a directorial note about how La Bayadère is too racist for them to want to do it but Kingdom of the Shades has fun choreography and stands alone. This is completely fair as a decision, but as aforementioned I personally do not tend to like choreographic set pieces sliced out of classical ballet with no context very much and though I do like ghost sequences this was not ghost enough to hold my interest.

HOWEVER, I extremely enjoyed Jorma Elo's Carmen. Apparently in this ballet version Carmen is supposed to be a fashion model, Don Jose is a business man of some sort and Escamillo is meant to be a Formula One driver -- I'll be honest, I did not really get any of that from the staging (and was a bit disappointed not to get a racecar on stage at any point) -- but the dancing was all extremely intense and compelling and emotional; it's the first time I've heard people gasp out loud at the ballet! this audience did not know that Carmen was going to have murders! and Ji Young Chae, who was standing in for Carmen the night we saw it (I think it's usually Lia Cirio) is one of those dancers I am now watching for every time we go -- no matter what she's doing she always looks like she is just having a fantastic time dancing, which is a really fun energy for Carmen in particular, I think.

Spring Experience: The three shorts on this one were Ken Ossola's "The Space Between," William Forsythe's "Blake Works III: The Barre Project," and Jiří Kylián’s "Bella Figura". The first was apparently inspired by Michaelangelo sculptures, which I read in the program and then immediately forgot while watching it -- the thing that struck me about it was how often the dancers were moving like they were being piloted around by the joints on their elbows and knees, which I think is not incompatible with 'sculpture themes' probably. I liked it but it ran a little long for me; I sort of lost the ability to continue focusing on it after about twenty minutes.

I loved "Blake Works III," which uses music by James Blake, a "post-dubstep" artist whose stuff I had never heard before and frankly don't think I would like much out of this context, but the shifting/jarring/sweeping electronic sounds with big stops in between worked really really well for me as paired with the choreography -- when everything came together right it managed to make it feel like the dancers were creating the music with their movement and I dug that very much.

"Bella Figura" sort of half worked for me and half didn't; it's a very experimental/structural piece, I told genarti afterwards that it felt like it was posing questions that I didn't have the context to answer. Why is there fire on the stage at the end? WHO COULD SAY. NOT ME. But there's one bit where all the dancers are topless and wearing the same enormous big red skirts on the bottom, the only visual difference on stage is that some of them have breasts and some don't, and there's a bit when there's just three of them on stage -- a female dancer in front, a male and female dancer behind her, all of them doing the same choreography -- when I did feel like I understood part of what I was being asked to look at, like it was encouraging me to look in a different way at these different kinds of human forms that are so often in ballet doing very different things, which I thought was very cool.