Ballet

[beccaelizabeth]

I have been watching Romeo and Juliet. It's like 1 hour 40 minutes in but it has taken me lots of days cause I can't keep concentrating when I can't make the dancing into a story and so far the dancing just looks like a lot of dancing to me. Mostly. It's kind of creepy. Sometimes the guy dancing is fun but the Juliet dancing where she's all up on her toes and supposed to be so pretty she just looks like she's made of pins and sharp things, all tension and precision. Nobody ever looks at home in their bodies, or like they're just dancing cause they can move that way. It's all weird poise.

Also when Romeo and Juliet are dancing together and it's supposed to be all romantic they don't spend hardly any time facing each other let alone looking at each other cause he's making her fly around and cause she's flying she's all tense and weird shapes and it's like the least romantic thing ever. I mean I understand what the tango is saying and why people want to dance that way, but I can't watch someone sticking their legs out in a P shape while someone picks them up horisontal and shoulder height and think 'sexy'.

Right now I'm watching her be all apprehensive and run away and sneak up and run away again, which works in pointy toes ballet, but tension is all I'm getting from girl ballet at all at all and it don't really work.

There's still some very impressive muscles going on. Dancers have bodies that work.

And the music is telling a story but I'm not sure it's the same story the dancing is telling which is also not helping, and I'm often vague on how it's telling Romeo and Juliet specificly, and everyone looks like creepy doll people and it's weird.

I really really don't read ballet.

ETA: Now she's doing her best impression of rigor mortis and it looks very much like all the previous dancing this is why it was creepy yes he's carrying her around and lifting her up and making same shapes like before only she's meant to be a corpse OMG how is ballet ever not creepy! Very creepy this.

Comments

[raine]

I would turn that off, chica, and go see if you can get a hold of the 1968 movie version of Romeo & Juliet (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063518/) -- it remains one of my favorite versions of the play. The ballet is supposed to be very grand and emotive, but most ballets use the version scored by Sergei Prokofiev, which sounds like a dirge to me for way too much of it. (Granted, it is a tragedy, but I get annoyed when the music tries to hit me over the head with something I already know.)

[beccaelizabeth]

Zeferelli is on the study in class list, but we're meant to spend all semester looking at different transformations, stage to film or ballet or West Side Story. So I can't skip one if I want to be proper thorough.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

I think story ballets are sort of dumb, more than creepy, and prefer the Ballanchine works like Emeralds and Rubies that are more abstract and all about the weird poise with no narrative intended.

Julia, but then I have a global aversion to all R&J versions, and most of all West Side Story.

[beccaelizabeth]

I haven't watched ballet before that wasn't in an episode of something on TV
probably it would work better if there weren't any story to puzzle out

I dislike Romeo and Juliet, which is why it's fun spending the semester pulling it apart and less intimidating than the other other possibilities to be told to go and do a 'textual transformation' of it ie rewrite Shakespeare. I can fix it so people are less stupid and it's a valid response to the assignment. win.