shoes, shoes, little white shoes

[freckles_and_doubt]

Apparently an Iraqi journalist, with commendable restraint and understatement, threw a shoe at George Bush. (Rotten eggs, dog shit and a small grenade would also not qualify as excessive). It appears that throwing a shoe is a particularly marked gesture of contempt in Middle Eastern custom, although I have to agree with Making Light that it's hardly a friendly action in any cultural context¹. In my early years of high school I once threw both shoes (leather sandals, IIRC) at some particularly tormenting boarding school denizen who had celebrated my arrival in the hostel by announcing to the entire dining room my (entirely fabricated) romantic involvement with the school's biggest geek. I was a truly mousy and introverted schoolgirl basically incapable of either romantic involvement on any terms or actual acts of violence, so in that context throwing my shoes at the little bitch was an emblematic placeholder for ripping her head off and bouncing it against the wall, something I devoutly hope larger and more determined victims have achieved in the intervening years. I really didn't enjoy boarding school. It seems to turn even quite intelligent and potentially decent girls into ravening sociopaths².

All of this shoe-throwing is leading, by devious ways, to The Nutcracker, the Cape Town Ballet's version of which we saw yesterday at a matinee in the company of Da Niece. I'd forgotten what a charming, if slightly saccharine, fantasy the story is: little German girl is given a nutcracker shaped like a prince at a Victorian Christmas party, and subsequently dreams his transformation into a real prince and their journey into a wintry fantasy realm filled with dancing flowers and snowflakes and colourful ethnic performances and what have you. In order to be worthy of this Narnia-esque world (and one forgets quite how embedded that idea is in Western story) she intervenes in the fight between the rats and the toy soldiers by throwing her shoe at the King of the Rats, a somewhat dashing figure who, I have to say, I quite fancied despite Da Niece's palpable unease at the rat army. In this case the thrown shoe apparently kills him outright, which may have been the Iraqi journalist's actual subliminal intention in tossing a boot at Dubya. Only, alas, in children's fantasy are these idealised outcomes possible.

The matinee performance was notable not only for a slightly less than professional veneer (a large number of children in the cast, and lead Snowflakes who both clumped and distinctly wobbled) but also for the audience, in which I'd say about one person in four was female, under three foot high, and riveted to the action with slightly feral intensity. The whole ballet made me once again realise how artificial and stylised ballet codes actually are, but this clearly doesn't stop small girl-children from buying into the notion of the beautiful, floaty ballerina: during the walk back to the car, half the kids were either trying to turn pirouettes or to walk on their toes³. I bought into the ballet thing myself when I was a kid, did lessons for years and read all the Lorna Hills there are, but it's one of those interests where the ideal is considerably more appealing than the reality. Apart from the anorexia and injury, ballet is only really beautiful if you squint a bit and ignore the details - the strained positions, the dodgy gender politics, the clunky overstatement. I seem, tragically, to have lost that particular willing suspension of disbelief displayed by balletomanes and children: I'm not sure if I should be sad or proud.

---

¹ With the sole exception, now that I come to think of it, of throwing old shoes after just-married couples as a good luck thing. What's with that? deliberate invocation and thus inversion of the negative implications? Or an implicit confirmation of my own somewhat cynical view on marriage as a social institution?

² If only, in my case, mentally and wistfully.

³ A manifestation rife with the potential for slightly amusing disaster.

Comments

Cracking Nuts

[bronchitikat.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the time, when our children were younger & D was having dance lessons, that I arranged for us to see a production of the Nutcracker which was being danced by English National Ballet.

"At least the music will be good" semi-grumped my not totally uncultured husband.

Shortly afterwards he noticed that the Moscow City Ballet were doing their own version, & suggested we see that. So we did. That had a slightly more Freudian interpretation of the Clara/Prince thing, being someone else's choreography - Nureyev I think.

Anyhow, since then we've always tried to catch ENB productions when they've visited locally - well danced, well staged, plenty of interesting 'business' & (usually) brightly costumed, well worth the visit.

Most recently we saw them doing Macmillan's choreography of "Sleeping Beauty", & "Manon" which came as quite a revelation as we've usually seen Tchaikovsky ballets before.

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

My esteemed parents-in-law highly recommend the current production, which I seem to recall Top Billing presenting as a rather unusual interpretation.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

one person in four was female, under three foot high, and riveted to the action with slightly feral intensity.

What's with that? I know it's sold to them, but you can't sell where there's no demand to start off with.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I personally classify it mentally under "small girl pink" - there's a sort of innate attraction to the idealised femininity of the ballerina - beauty, grace, lovely clothes, centre-of-attention status, support by adoring if not too manly male - which small girls seem to manifest regardless of how many bright yellow digger trucks you give them. Either cultural gender codes are deeply pernicious from an early age (which of course they are), or there is a female-linked gene for pink/princesses/ballerinas.

[(Anonymous)]

The sole exception, eh? *sigh*

I love ballet, but I suppose, only *some* ballets. Never could bear the Nutcracker, nor for that matter Manon. But, I don't entirely agree that it's only beautiful when you ignore the strained positions etc; I think that does depend on the production and the dancers. I saw Darcey Bussell once and she was utterly unreal - no sign of strain at all - fluid, precise, amazingly graceful. Similarly, not all ballets are full of weird stuff. I like abstract ballets (Balanchine etc) and some of the more classical ones - Romeo & Juliet never fails to make me cry, although I am not a fan of the actual story - but I get very easily irritated when there's too much of the weird gender politics, or for that matter weird choreography that makes no sense.

Overstatement, well yes, but no worse than opera...

scroob

[mac1235.livejournal.com]

You've seen St Trinians, right?

Joss Whedon on knitting and crochet

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

http://crochetme.com/blog/joss-whedon-crafts-and-craftiness-interview-transcript

As seen on the Nerdy Knitters and Geekcraft forums on Ravelry.

[tngr-spacecadet.livejournal.com]

I blame it entirely on the sparkly tutus.

I love watching ballet, to the point where there were used to be boys who knew I would only date them if they brandished ballet tickets.