The Dance House

Last night, I went to the ballet. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I last went – I vaguely recall that my mother bought the first two Harry Potter books to keep my sister and I entertained – and it’s only the third ballet I’ve seen. The others were the Nutcracker and the Gay Swan Lake.

Anyway, last night the Birmingham Royal Ballet were in town, and the costumes on the poster looked pretty. So I went and talked some people into joining me.

(this is a review of sorts. Of rambling sorts. By someone who knows very little about ballet. Hence, it’s a review without a grade)

They performed three pieces, Galanteries, The Dance House, and Elite Syncopations. The first was ballet for the sake of ballet, the second appeared to have a plot, but I couldn’t work out what it was, and the third was what I’d imagine Wodehouse would be like in dance form.

You may have gathered I don’t know much about ballet. None of us who went had the faintest idea what any of the ballets were about. So I made up my own*.

Galanteries, I decided, was about android dolls. It began with the whole troupe, but soon slide into duo and solo performances. The first, actually, was a trio. Two men lifting and moving a woman around, in a way that gave a strong impression of a living doll. This was followed by a couple with a woman who seemed to have a little more agency. The next couple splt quickly, the woman dancing solo with joie de vivre. Followed by another solo performance which struck me as a more mature woman’s dance…

You see where I’m going. The female dancers seemed to have increased free will as the sequence went on. It was fairly hard to ascribe a plot to, overall. The costumes were nice, but not nice enough to earn a photo here.

I identified The Dance House as being set at a dance studio quite promptly, and originally gave it a plot of “male dance teacher seduces young female student”, but I decided this was far too obvious and plumped for a bus analogue instead. Women in a queue, wearing costumes with a stripe to show which line bus they were waiting for.

This started to fall apart quite quickly as an analogy, even though I attempted to incorporate “woman waiting for night bus to run away from home” and “the London Underground” into the now over-extended metaphor, but even after I chose to abandon it I couldn’t stop referring to the male lead as “the day bus” (he’s the guy in the photo at the top).

Plotwise, it slid into a kind of post-apocalyptic facist state. The red stripe dancers seemed opposed to the black stripe dancers, and the Day Bus used his influence to make them into some kind of zombies. The London Underground couple (clearly the good guys) danced cheerfully throughout them. The Day Bus eventually exerted his control over everyone except the London Undergrond couple.

Basically, I have no idea what was going on, but I quite liked it. Having read the summary on the BRB website, I think they got the tone down perfectly, and that if I’d known it was a danse macabre beforehand instead of realising about halfway through, I might have come up with a plot that made rather more sense.

And on to Elite Syncopations, the one on the poster. Bright and cheerful with whimsical costumes. A kind of 1920s gliteratti gathering, with an odd number of people so one dancer never found a partner. Very, very Wodehouse. Several comic pieces, and a generally lighthearted tone throughout. The band were actually on stage as well, which was nice. I enjoyed it so much I don’t actually have much to say. You can see some extracts on YouTube.

In terms of actual quality… Not Great. There were several fumbled catches and bad stumbles, especially in the earlier pieces. Quite a lot of the timing was off – so much so we wondered if that was part of the choreography. They seemed determined to go on with the dance as learnt regardless of what the band was doing. Apart from Kosuke Yamamoto, none of the dancers seemed to enjoy themselves until Elite Syncopations. Kosuke was adorable, and noticeably better than many of the other Soloists. You might ask if I could do better, but the point to be made is that I think they could have.

To conclude: Elite Syncopations made it worth it, but overall I am glad I was in the cheap seats.

*My friend Derek recently wrote about writing, and I’d like to quote her here:

“Narrate, motherfuckers.”

I think the tendency to narrate your own life (or a more interesting one, to keep yourself entertained) is a sign of being a writer. The only problem is it’s quite hard to turn it off. Hence making up stories about the ballets.