Blanche Neige- A Night at the Ballet
One of the cultural experiences that the Bing Program had lined up for us was a night at the ballet! So Tuesday night we all assembled on the steps of Chaillot Theater ready to be entertained!
For my part, I cannot particularly remember ever attending a professional ballet, though I am sure that I saw The Nutcracker at some point. Thus, I was quite excited! There were some ballerinas in our group who were ecstatic, however, and I was looking forward to learning about ballet through their observations.
Overall, I enjoyed the show, but was not blown away. As I learned afterwards, the style was not so much classical ballet as it was modern; one girl complained about poor turnouts and not holding lines. The costumes were also interesting to say the least. They were famously designed by Jean Paul Gaultier (my lack of fashion knowledge is revealed in the fact that I had never heard of JPG), but seemed quite off. They awkwardly fit the dancers and never seemed to really work with the dance itself. And though I could certainly understand the story, I thought some dances were excessively long or totally unnecessary. Again, I am uncultured in this area, but those were the observations of my untrained eye.
Two dance sequences were phenomenal, however! The first was a wire act along the back wall by the seven dwarfs. It didn’t strike me as dance, however, more like acrobatic training and timing. I convinced myself that will some time of the wall I could replicate the sequence.
The other dance was between Prince Charming and Snow White. The latter is, at this point, still quite dead, but that didn’t stop the prince from a passionate and energetic dance with her limp body! Prince Charming threw her around the stage, picking her up, letting her down, twirling her about in his arms, while she remained entirely limp! I focused on Snow White herself, looking for some sort of muscle definition that gave away the complexity of the dance she was performing, but she remained still the entire time! It was remarkable to see the two interact and perform- what seemed to me- a difficult dance without letting on that both were dancing. It actually seemed that the prince was dancing with a corpse, although Snow White was in actuality dancing her heart out. Quite cool!
Anyways, I am off now, probably to the Louvre to take in some art. This afternoon there is a guided tour of Montmatre that I will be going on. I am quite looking forward to it!
Until later,
Austin
