PNB does Midsummer Night's Dream

1 part aesthetically pleasing, yet altogether crazy, glittery costuming
mix with Mendelssohn
marinate in equal parts opera virtuoso performance and overly-contrived emotive displays
let sit for two hours
entertainment may be thin at first glance, but with time lasting impressions will congeal

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The above sounds horrendously critical, but I don't mean it to be so, just candid really. Disclaimer: ballet isn't really my thing. As a former figure skater I empathize to a certain degree, but on the whole I didn't find them all that graceful, at least not as much so as I had expected to. Perhaps I set my expectations too high in this and other arenas. But, I digress. The first act was a whirlwind and what really struck me was the emotion. And, it seemed, that the more important someone's role was, the more glitter their costume had. Layers of ascriptive difference, man. I also spent a lot of time contemplating what things must have been like behind the scenes. When I did ice shows I know relations with some of my fellow soloists weren't exactly sterling off the ice, but we didn't let that show when we were performing. I kind of watched for that during PNB's performance, just for an inkling, an itsy bitsy tidbit that hinted at strained relations. I came out empty-handed but it could be because I was tired and have horrible eyesight..At any rate, that is a valuable lesson for moi. That no matter what happens in/out of the group or class, when we go on stage the rest is external and does not gain admission. You can't let the audience see it-b/c if discord is there, they will pick up on it.

Act II...Divertissement. I didn't really know what the purpose of the second act was. I decided to focus on the music. The costumes, of the secondary characters at least, were soo horrendous. (The girls in the shrimp-colored tutus?? erlack! They looked like cheap candycanes. All in all, it doesn't much matter because the costumes were not the main idea and won't likely be in our compositions, or at least I won't have to look like a candycane...most likely). So I closed my eyes a lot, which helped with focusing on the music and really feeling it pulse through me. I also imagined, especially for the really sloooow moving songs that went on for eons and eons, if I were to skate to it what would I do with my body to express how it made me feel, how I interpreted it? And it was almost eerie but whenever I opened my eyes to see what they were doing on stage it almost entirely mirrored what I had envisioned in my mind.

All in all I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the music and the white dresses more than anything. Again, ballet is not my divertissement of choice so take my flotsam with a grain of salt. I miss going to the symphony.

I think it was cute that a lot of us said we hadn't really been to any other ballets since the Nutcracker. And that there was a cute little girl in a pink dress dancing through the lobby during intermission. That was me, 17 years ago, an aspiring sugar plum. I still am-aspiring that is.