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| Image via La Wik |
A friend was telling me about her niece who had once danced with the Atlanta Ballet. It's quite a hard business to get into, actually a lot like professional sports - many start training as children and put in long hours because of the love of the thing. But few make it to the Big Leagues. A lot drop out along the way because injuries can be quite serious, ending promising careers before they even begin.
And before you tell me that yes, but it's still frou-frou, let me just say Louis XIV, the Sun King himself danced the ballet. L'etat, c'est moi: I am the State and the State damn well better dance if it knows what's good for it. Err, the translation is a little bold, but you catch my drift.
And so instead of frou-frou, it's perhaps better for the casual ballet observer to think of the dances as baseball innings, or football downs. You have great athletes (yes, there's no other term for the performers), great music, and - especially in today's selection from the Nutcracker - a set of different dances that you can think of as third and long (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy) or first and goal (Russian Dance). While it might seem declassé to analyze the art on display this way, this gives the dancers the due that they've earned for the really brutal training and weeding out that they've been through.
And steel toe shoes are hot. If I'm lying, I'm dieing.
Hopefully my friend will still talk to me after this post ...
Grace, poise, athleticism and wonderful music -- what's not to like?
ReplyDeleteCute young things in skimpy outfits... er... Yep, LOTS of work, and you don't want to see their bare feet! Saw the Nutcracker years ago done by the Bolshoi Ballet, the Russians do it as a dark ballet. VERY interesting!
ReplyDeleteEveryone should see the Nutcracker at least once. Old NFO, you are right about the Bolshoi - it ended too quickly for me - I wanted more!
ReplyDeleteI dare anybody to get up in this guy's face and tell him ballet is frou-frou.
ReplyDeleteOld NFO - you are right about the feet. My daughter, who took ballet from age 4 to 7 (she is now 24), ended lessons by telling us she didn't want to have feet like the older girls. Of course, soccer was not a whole lot better . . .
ReplyDeleteOne of my nieces dances for the Royal New Zealand Ballet. She refers to the "Law of the Work Horse" - each day with no training sets you back three days work.
ReplyDeleteI've never been a fan of Opera (it hasn't got a beat and I can't dance to it), but dance ... oh yeah.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I took my 2-year old daughter to a local production of "The Nutcracker". My daughter was spellbound, and so was I. Even with "amateurs" dancing the lead roles, it was magnificent.
My local Ballet Theatre has performed "The Nutcracker" every Christmas for the past 20 years. I just found out about that, because this article led me to look it up. I've got five months to wait until I can see it again.
Maybe I can encourage some of my shooting buddies to join me. It won't be the same as sharing it with my daughter ... and her children .. though.
I enjoy the ballet, and was told as an undergrad that the foot positions (first, second, third, etc.) were originally adapted from fencing. There are similarities, and that's the main reason I took a semester of phys-ed ballet: in a prior semester, I took fencing and fell in love with it.
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