Groupon then serendipitously offered a three production
season pass to the California Ballet. I bought two of them.
I took a few ballet classes in college in addition to tap
and acting, but I can in no way say that I could appreciate ballet in any sort
of informed way. Hence the casual status of my viewership.
The season consisted of Dracula, The Nutcracker, and Swan
Lake.
Dracula
Dracula plays out like truncated silent movie ballet version of the silent movie. There wasn’t enough dancing. When they danced, they didn’t dance like ballerinas. There was a tango at one point. The plot was convoluted. It woefully needed narration to explain the plot transitions. In this way, the silence was distracting.
The play took place a week or so before Halloween. In
theory, it would be a festive, rather classy nod to the holiday.
A lot of people didn’t come back after the first
intermission. In my memory, I regret not leaving myself. It was far too long,
much longer than a ballet should be. The
only moment I remember after the intermission was that frightening last scene.
That could have been the whole ballet, in my opinion.
I went to the preshow lecture. The dance coordinator kept
talking about the legacy of the person that penned the ballet in this very
ballet company, now deceased. Also,
about how the dancing cycles of the two Dracula victims are distinct. The more
religious one had a tighter, more restrictive dance pattern, and the accepting
floozy danced it fast and loose. That nuance was the best character development
in the whole play.
Alex and I figure that the subpar ballet is due to not
wanting to mess with the legacy of everyone’s beloved ballet director. I can see that making revision practically
impossible.
Dracula the dud ballet is the reason I find it a waste to
buy a season pass for next year.
The Nutcracker
The nutcracker takes place around Christmas time. It is perfectly festive for the holidays. There is something so bright and cheery that it just makes you want to buy stuff.
The nutcracker story
is really popular. Certainly you know it already. A young girl has a dream involving a series of
lovely things and also a rat king. One
of those lovely things is a snow queen.
The cast was enormous, the snow queen beautiful, and the
frothiest of costumes. The costume frothiness really added to the whimsy as it
played a major role in the floor play, as you can imagine. There was a portion
where the Turkish delight dancers were organized by rainbows, by colors, by
color hue, and then whoa, like rainbows again. Okay, I bet that didn’t sound
amazing, but it had a lovely effect.
I can see how the family of a young lady would make seeing
this ballet as an annual family tradition, but I don’t need to see it again.
Swan Lake
I liked this one most of all. The dancers were so light on the their feet, it was like they were flying. The costuming and scenery really let the dancing breathe, and it let you sit back and appreciate the technical excellence of the dance team.
The story is about a commitment phobic prince that falls in
love with a swan that will only turn into a woman if he admits that he loves
her. When he is about to “reveal his love” a sorcerer switches his swan with a
black swan, the sorcerers daughter to boot.
The company brought
in a set of dancers from Holland for this single weekend production. Their
capability was noticeably better than everyone else. I was taken aback by their
beauty even before I read the playbill, before I even know to look for
something to set them apart from the other dancers.
I also noticed that the Japanese woman and the best friend
were also excellent, much better than the dancers they were aligned
symmetrically too. This probably doesn’t mean much to you, but I was pretty
impressed with myself for picking out the tenured principle dancers for this
company.
There was one moment that will stick in my mind. There was
this final scene where the prince and the swan dance happily into their futures
together. There were a lot of tight spins to illustrate this. At the end of one
of the hundreds of tight spins, the prince stops the swan, in a split second
carefully sets her up, and pulls back his hands and stepped back quickly for
effect. The swan for was balancing perfectly still on a single pointe for close
to 15 seconds. It was breathtaking.
If Swan Lake was the only ballet I saw for the rest of my
life, I think I’d be okay with that.
Next Season?
I’m not so excited about next season. They are playing
Dracula (eh), The Nutcracker (okay) and Sleeping Beauty. I obviously have no
opinion about sleeping beauty. It may be
just as contrived as Dracula was because
it is predated by a fairy tale and a movie. It might lean too heavily on
costumes and assuming that the audience knows what is happening next.
Are you planning on going to the ballet next year?