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mad maidens and others
Wednesday, 1 November 2006 06:57 pmI haven't watched ballet for a number of years, as my fairly thorough habituation to opera was spiking the balletic enjoyment guns - I kept waiting for all these impossibly thin people with the steel and rubber legs to open their mouths and start with the singing. Nothing like over-immersion in completely the wrong set of stylized communication codes. However, old age is apparently mellowing me and I leaped at the chance of a random free ticket to Giselle on Sunday.
I enjoy ballet, I really do, but it's a dashed contradictory artistic experience. On the one hand it's pure magic: beautiful shapes, limbs in beautiful attitudes, bodies moving in graceful, co-ordinated patterns, and, this being Giselle, lots of white net and amazing misty forests at night, with gravestones. But basically, muscular, scarily co-ordinated, very hard-working people are setting out with maximum effort to persuade you that, in defiance of physics, people actually are lighter than air. Ballet is an illusion. It doesn't just disguise its own effort, it also disguises the anorexia, bleeding feet, psychotic training routines and savage body image problems which underly the effort. At least opera singers are (a) clearly working their butts off when they sing, and (b) frequently overweight.
I also think my exposure to opera has wrecked me for classical balletic mime (of which there is a lot in Giselle). After the nuance and suggestiveness of the vocal, mime is horribly like SHOUTING THE POINT unecessarily, again and again, in words of one syllable, which are anyway reiterating what the music has just said. An awful lot of Giselle comes down to some variation on "I love you! let's dance!".
All of which being said, don't for a moment think I didn't love the ballet. It's one of my favourites, being basically as Goth as all get-out: beautiful village girl discovers that lover is an Aristocrat who is Just Trifling With Her Affections; she goes mad, dies. Rises as ghost to join a corps of undead vampiric maidens crossed in love and dressed in white. They entrap men and make them dance until they die of exhaustion. Except for Aristocrat, who is forgiven and escapes when the vampire maidens return to their graves at dawn. Giselle herself, when you get down to it, is a bit of a feeb, but the vampire maidens are wicked cool.
I enjoy ballet, I really do, but it's a dashed contradictory artistic experience. On the one hand it's pure magic: beautiful shapes, limbs in beautiful attitudes, bodies moving in graceful, co-ordinated patterns, and, this being Giselle, lots of white net and amazing misty forests at night, with gravestones. But basically, muscular, scarily co-ordinated, very hard-working people are setting out with maximum effort to persuade you that, in defiance of physics, people actually are lighter than air. Ballet is an illusion. It doesn't just disguise its own effort, it also disguises the anorexia, bleeding feet, psychotic training routines and savage body image problems which underly the effort. At least opera singers are (a) clearly working their butts off when they sing, and (b) frequently overweight.
I also think my exposure to opera has wrecked me for classical balletic mime (of which there is a lot in Giselle). After the nuance and suggestiveness of the vocal, mime is horribly like SHOUTING THE POINT unecessarily, again and again, in words of one syllable, which are anyway reiterating what the music has just said. An awful lot of Giselle comes down to some variation on "I love you! let's dance!".
All of which being said, don't for a moment think I didn't love the ballet. It's one of my favourites, being basically as Goth as all get-out: beautiful village girl discovers that lover is an Aristocrat who is Just Trifling With Her Affections; she goes mad, dies. Rises as ghost to join a corps of undead vampiric maidens crossed in love and dressed in white. They entrap men and make them dance until they die of exhaustion. Except for Aristocrat, who is forgiven and escapes when the vampire maidens return to their graves at dawn. Giselle herself, when you get down to it, is a bit of a feeb, but the vampire maidens are wicked cool.
