freckles_and_doubt: (Default)
Freckles & Doubt ([personal profile] freckles_and_doubt) wrote2006-11-01 06:57 pm

mad maidens and others

I 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.

(Anonymous) 2006-11-01 10:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Funny, that's just what Pip says (the music's started, they're on stage, when are they going to start singing?) but I have the opposite problem: when are they going to shut up and dance? And singing never looks like hard work to me, even though of course I know it is.

Never seen Giselle, always loved the sound of it. Wicked cool maidens, yes.

scroob

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2006-11-02 10:03 am (UTC)(link)
Actually, the first half of Giselle is really a bit twee: lots of rustic village youths and maidens enthusiastically inviting each other to dance, or being patronisingly invited to dance by the snooty representatives of the aristocracy who are amusing themselves by slumming it in the country. Enthusiastic dancing then takes place more or less endlessly in a variety of combinations, all punctuated with Giselle clutching at her weak heart whenever she dances too much. It's really a bit of a relief when her jealous village-boy would-be-lover lets the cat out of the bag about the rich bastard seducer and we can get on with the madness and death.

Although I may be unduly cynical on this point. Possibly.

the nuance of opera

[identity profile] wolverine-nun.livejournal.com 2006-11-02 07:03 am (UTC)(link)
nuance and suggestiveness of the vocal
Um, as Terry Pratchett loves to point out, in opera people sing secret things at the top of their voices in the middle of crowds, as well as repeat the obvious many times over. While I love opera, I struggle to see it as nuanced and suggestive.

My dad hated ballet. He felt a bunch of men in tights leaping about the stage mocked the beautiful music. My mum hated opera, everyone dies. I went to opera with my dad and ballet with my mum :).

Re: the nuance of opera

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2006-11-02 07:15 am (UTC)(link)
I quite like the way everyone dies in opera. It's comforting that in the uncertainties of modern existence there are at least some outcomes you can rely on.

I find opera far more emotionally nuanced and suggestive than ballet, possibly because I'm an English academic and more tuned to voice than to gesture. Ballet is so stylised, I really don't have the emotional connection to it I do to opera.

Re: the nuance of opera

(Anonymous) 2006-11-02 09:09 am (UTC)(link)
No, I'm with wolverine nun, I can't see opera as any more subtle or less stylised than ballet. Different, yes.

It might be interesting to see whether preferences for each form were related to a more audio or visually oriented brain. (I know I'm way more visual.)

I enjoy opera, but I can't think of any that make me actually cry, the way Romeo and Juliet does. (And I'm really not a fan of the R&J story. It's just the dancing and the music that is so powerful at the end... sob!)

scroob

Re: the nuance of opera

[identity profile] extemporanea.livejournal.com 2006-11-02 09:57 am (UTC)(link)
I seem to be absolutely incoherent at the moment, judging by the hobnailed boots with which [livejournal.com profile] wytchfynder is jumping all over my attempts at argument in the comments train on my last post... I blame the hormones. Memo to self, re-embrace contraceptives of some sort before maddened friends bludgeon me to death with teh Internet.

What I was attempting to say is that, yes, absolutely, I am totally socialised into opera rather than ballet; I am not for an instant claiming that opera is inherently more noble or communicative, just that it communicates better to me. Unlike you, I cry buckets in opera. Giselle going mad with hop, skip and gesture makes me think "oooh, pretty" and "gosh, she wobbled in that arabesque." Mimi's last aria as she perishes in her garret makes me howl like a feeble baby, even if the damned soprano does have the body language of a sack of potatoes.

Basically, YMMV :>.

Re: the nuance of opera

(Anonymous) 2006-11-02 01:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Bloody friends, arguing all over your blog. Cheek! ;-)

You're not at all incoherent, it's actually me; all I meant to say was that I find it interesting how/why reactions do differ. And it came out as "you're wrong". Whoops.

I saw La Boheme last weekend for the first time ever. General consensus among the party was that sitting as very far back as it's possible to sit in the Royal Opera House (i.e. pretty damn far) resulted in some emotional disengagement. My reaction consisted mostly of: gosh, there's even less plot than most operas; why don't they close the damn door when they leave the garret; and *yawn* she's dead. Yup. Didn't see that coming.

There was a naked girl on stage at one point, though. Spicy!

Puccini

[identity profile] wolverine-nun.livejournal.com 2006-11-03 07:33 am (UTC)(link)
Your less than enthusiastic review of La Boheme sent me to my music collection in a rush to relisten to it, but I got distracted.

Tosca

Bliss

Coherence

[identity profile] egadfly.livejournal.com 2006-11-03 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
I don't think you've been the slightest bit incoherent, either here or in the elephants and hagfish extravaganza.

The problem, to the extent that there is one, seems twofold. First, blogging is a difficult medium for discussing the logic of complex issues, because good blogging is usually brief, and the logic of complexity usually isn't. Inevitably, a writer makes conceptual summaries and skips logical steps for the sake of readability. This is unproblematic when the reader shares the writer's assumptions, and can get interesting when they don't.

Second, absent tone of voice and body language, questioning can be interpreted as aggressive when it is intended as investigative. (Hell, this happens a lot even with all the tone and body cues in face to face interaction.) The response to the perceived aggression usually leads to further perceptions of aggression, etc. Cue spiral, downwards, and away from the substantive points of the argument.

When you get into really interesting discussions, therefore, it pays to be patient, and to be easy on all concerned, yourself included.

Sorry to pontificate, if that's how it seems. Not the intention. Just didn't want you thinking a sharp disagreement meant you (or [livejournal.com profile] wytchfinder, for that matter) were being in any way incoherent or otherwise at fault.