photo credit: violscraper
Few twenty-two year olds could call themselves ballet aficionados. I am not among those few. As a child we had an old family friend, Barbara, whose children were grown up and childless. Lacking grandchildren of her own to spoil, she would take us to a show every Christmas as a special treat. Usually it was a pantomime or a musical but on two very special occasions we were granted entry to the esoteric world of the ballet, a very adult experience that stayed with me much more vividly than the tired jokes and garish colours of festive musical comedies. The first ballet I ever saw was a children’s adaptation of the Nutcracker, a gorgeous production full of silk and lights and the most wonderful music I’d ever heard. I was mesmerised from start to finish. Every year since, when the festive shows cycled around and the dark evenings filled with gold and coloured lights, I would see bill posters on theatre walls and be filled with a longing to revisit that experience of plush velvet chairs raked into an elaborately corniced ceiling, gilt facades and Tchaikovsky’s fabulous dream sequence. I imagined myself as Lara swept into a world of animated sweets by a handsome but thoroughly sexually unthreatening toy-come-to-life. I took up ballet that year (and dropped it again as soon as I realised it wasn’t as easy as they made it look.) I loved the elegant movements, the costumes, the atmosphere of the theatre, but mostly I loved the story. It was a whole new kind of story-telling for me, without a word spoken or written, in which every emotion and intention was expressed through movement. The idea was mind-blowing.
This year the Northern Ballet brought the Nutcracker to the Manchester Opera House and I made the very serious financial decision to go. At £21.50 for the cheapest seats in the house, it was well out of my budget as a recent graduate and bar drudge, but I wanted it. I wanted to taste indulgence in the way people do when they madly splash out on anything they can’t afford, like appetisers.
I harassed all my friends and managed to convince one to go with me. We were half an hour early so we went to the bar. Immediately, we left the bar, and then the theatre, and scurried to Tesco to fill my shabby backpack with mini wine bottles, cackling with glee. Our seats were high up in the gallery and we hung over the front-row barrier in a way that made me remember the opening scene of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 classic, The Red Shoes. In that scene three keen young music students cram to the front row of the gallery to see their maestro’s latest work in concert. The overwhelming feeling of youthful excitement was the same as we waited for the show to begin. Our arms dangled through the barrier and we pressed our foreheads to the bar, straining to see through the bulky floodlights.
When the lights dropped and the music began I was watching the pit, dying of envy. I have always wanted to play the cello and here were two – a whole ensemble, in fact, of the kind of instruments I would be too afraid to touch in case I dirtied them. But as the curtain lifted, my eyes were drawn to the scene of aristocratic privilege and idyllic, 19th century domesticity on-stage. Enjoying it made me feel guilty; it was too white, too rich, too decadent, but it was beautiful.
Even as a newcomer to ballet, I could tell the production was a little low budget, it lacked the depth, texture and whirlwind scene changes of the production I remembered. Even so, the second act was still the fast-paced medley of Turkish delights, nymphic snowflake rites and Russian dancers in kitsch costume spinning to Klezmer-like melodies with the same wonderful energy and folktale of my childhood. I tried not to notice the bare, flat lighting and the fact that almost the entire second act was played out using the same set, causing it to lose that sense of moving, Alice-like, through another world. It struck me as strange how important it was to me for it to be perfect, strange that I felt cheated by its imperfections. I wondered if everyone else felt the same way.
In the interval, with a subtle nod from the usher, we slipped into the half-empty circle and looked for better seats. The circle-seat-paying audience looked at us with outrage. We obviously didn’t belong there with the pearly old ladies and their half-moon bespectacled husbands in their cashmere jumpers. We sat down anyway and slurped our smuggled bottles of red, feeling warm and obstinate. People bought expensive ice-creams at some extortionate theatre price. I sell those ice-creams where I work. They’re not very nice.
I had always thought ballet had to look as expensive and perfect as its cultural reputation (and its ticket prices) suggested it was. This was a ballet dancing for spare change. At one point an anonymous voice came through the PA, appealing to the audience to ‘sponsor a dancer’: Just £3 a month or something. My illusion of high culture as the last vestige of the sort of lofty wealth enjoyed by Lara’s family began, ironically, to crumble. Ballet began to reshape itself for me as a sweating, dusty labour of conservation – something like a battle re-enactment – of an aristocratic decadence long dead. I began to notice the makeup melting under electric lights, the strain of sinews and the loud thump of feet on the chalky boards of the stage. It made me feel sad in the way behind-the-scenes tours of popular children’s films make me feel sad because I’m forced to see that the whole set-up is hollow.
But the music, that was still the same: utterly spellbinding, riveting, soothing and sinister all at once. It gave me tingles. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I felt like I was breathing it. There is something about listening to live classical music that feels unreal. Perhaps it’s because it’s just such a rare experience for most people these days that it seemed as though I’d fallen into a recording. For someone belonging to a generation saturated with music videos and DJ’s it felt impossible for music like this to be, for want of a better expression, 3D. The Romantics would have said I felt ‘transported’ and I think that’s as close as anyone could come to the sensation of being lifted into the fibres and textures of the music, I could feel its shapes and the horsehair scraping over nylon and the taste of metallic mouthpieces vibrating around me. I wondered at the fact that it felt strange when I’d heard it a thousand times before. Everywhere. Christmas advertising bleeds and sweats Tchaikovsky to the point where the Nutcracker’s hits have achieved a chillingly cynical pop-art status. A bit of tinsel, a small boy in pyjamas and those tinkling notes and you have an instant cipher for Christmas Magic. My personal bubble of magic had been despoiled by mass consumption.
I left the theatre in denial. I didn’t acknowledge my disappointment until the bright lights had worn out in my eyes and I started writing. Honestly, I feel a bit ashamed of myself. I couldn’t reasonably expect flesh and blood human beings to recreate the glittering object of my childish imagination. It was a good performance and the experience, the newness of it all was thrilling, but nothing in reality can ever live up to a dream, as Lara’s story illustrates. On the bright side, at least my shattered dream didn’t involve waking up to roughly 15 years to live before the slaughter of my entire family by an angry, politicised proletariat.
I mentioned earlier that I had seen two ballets as a child. The second experience was somewhat less delightful than the first. I successfully ruined everyone’s enjoyment of Swan Lake at the National Theatre by being violently and mysteriously sick in the interval. My feelings for that particular ballet are less than fond, being are they are characterised less by nostalgia than by nausea.
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