Meh

About a year ago, when the 2007/2008 dance lineup was made public, the performance that excited me the most was the St Petersburg (Russia, not Florida) Ballet, who were to be performing Les Sylphides and two others. Classical ballet. That which makes me mushy, that for which I subscribe every year - not that I don’t enjoy other types of dance, I do! 

Except for the State Ballet of Georgia (the country, not the state) which I hated so much the first time that I sold my tickets the second time and I hope they don’t bring them back yet again, but apparently they think we like them which is why they brought them here twice within the space of about five years.

The reasons I disliked them so profoundly were many

1. No emotion, story or theme. 

To be sure, folk dances are highly symbolic of something or another: marriage, courage, spring, whatever, but ultimately, they don’t mean much to the onlooker from another culture if they’re as abstract as these dances were.

2. Too much testosterone. 

The men did all this very athletic kicking that we associate with Russian folk dancing, which is wonderful and amazing for about the first five minutes, and then gets quickly dull. 

The women did gliding. They wore floor-length dresses (and coats and scarves and hats and gloves) and would locomote from one side of the stage to the other with only horizoantal motion, no vertical. Again, all very well and good but dull after a few minutes. How much gliding for gliding’s sake can a person watch? For this person, about five minutes.

3. Too many clothes.

For me, part of the aesthetic of dance is the bodies of the dancers. They are fabulously fit with gorgeous musculature, and quite frankly, I love very revealing costumes, be they spandex all-in-ones or bikinis. I love watching the play of the muscles as they perform the simplest moves, let alone feats showcasing astonishing acrobatic prowess. These people wore way too many garments. They all had boots and hats (and presumably voluminus underwear) and pants or skirts (with petticoats) and shirts and vests and coats - altogether too much yardage to even imagine what lay underneath.

But classical ballet performed by the St Petersburg ballet, that was to be my ultimate treat.

Les Sylphides was lovely. Women in yards and yards of floaty white skirts with strange little sticky-out bows at the back waist, silly floral wreath headdresses, en pointe - what’s not to love? And I did.

This was followed by Scheherezade, which frankly made me sleepy. Clearly their choreographer is the same age as I am, as he appeared to have been heavily influenced by the video for Walk Like an Egyptian, which was rather silly considering that the sultan was what? Turkish? Arabic? Whatever, I don’t think they do the weird Walk Like an Egyptian hands. It was a little silly, long and dull, but very glittery.

The finale was a dance to Ravel’s Bolero, which in fact was written as dance music. The concept was a good one: men and women dressed almost exactly the same (the women had sports bras), moving in a counter-clockwise circle, all doing the same steps and movements, and every time the musical theme adds an instrument, one of the dancers goes into the centre of the circle and does stuff that the outer circlers are not doing, until eventually most of them are in the centre of the circle, doing their own things. When the final, all-instrument repeat comes around, everyone goes back to doing the same thing together, big, grand movements, and all is wonderful.

In theory.

The choreography was effective.

The costumes were not. Clearly, someone had made too many red satin harem pants for a version of Scheherezade performed back in the eighties when pants ended at or above the waist, and so instead of cutting them shorter to sit on the hips, they decided instead that paperbag waists are perfectly divine, making everyone look like the unpopular kids who would never get a date with the cheerleaders or the football players, but might have to join the checkers club instead, not being smart enough for the chess club.

A bit sad.

Also it seems, the choreographer was rather too enthralled with Riverdance and the supposed wonderfulness of Michael Flatley (whose annoying website has MUSIC, ugh), and so decided to have a main dancer, dressed in nice tight black pants, who was just a little to enamoured of himself .

Worst of all, the dancers were sloppy. Their synchronization was off, their movements not quite exactly like the others, and it ended up being a third-rate performance, which when properly done, could have been incredible.

Bit of a disappointment, that.

Not to worry, I’m in San Francisco, all happy after having spent time today with Sylvia and Alfred, and resting up before dinner this evening. 

Since yesterday, I can now report that I am no longer a Stitches virgin. This is neither here nor there, it just is.

I didn’t buy anything but lunch, though I do have two fabulous beads singing in my purse, and the possibility of a collaborative relationship with a local beadmaker, which I’m really excited about. More if and when it reaches fruition.