My friends invited me to Sadler’s Wells last night to see Russel Maliphant perform – I had no idea what to expect because I am a total dance pleb. I know what ballet is. That’s about it.
So when we sat down I had my fizzy drink and a packet of nuts at the ready. The lights went down and then barely came up again. Russell was tiny and perfectly proportioned, but I had to strain to see anything to start with. Incredibly atmospheric clouds and autumn leaves and moonlight sort of lighting – really beautiful, but for a dance pleb I really could barely make out where the dancers were, let alone what they were doing precisely. The next problem was that the entire theatre was completely silent – just no noise at all apart from slow piano music- which meant that I couldn’t eat my nuts because they were too loud and because of my fizzy drink I spent the whole time worrying I was going to burp loudly which would have been the biggest faux pas in the world. Honestly, I really can’t be taken anywhere. THANK GOD I didn’t take Builder Bloke with me. He’d have burped all the way though.
Afterwards, I really didn’t know what to say about the performance because I was standing with properly erudite people who know all about dance. I wanted to say that I’d have preferred the lights up so that I could see him properly (in fact I think I did say that) but luckily not to the person who had instigated all the lighting and was being loudly feted in the corner. I wanted to say that I liked the last 3 minutes best because he got a little more enthusiastic and a lot more like ballet as I knew it (which I think I did also say), but I couldn’t really ask why the rest of the time he seemed to be going round in circles, because apparently that was the point – thus followed a conversation about the circles and how something-esque it was and how somebody had gone mad many years ago, but sorry, they could have been speaking a different language and I can’t remember the details.
Lovely to try new things though and I must make more effort to learn a lot more about dance.
kelloggsville
April 5, 2011It find it rather annoying when an arty farty circle start babbling about how the something-esque represents the failed persona of the derivitive of the stance of the (insert noun here). And my internal voice is going “oh for f*cks sake it was a boring badly lit bloke going around in circles” and occassionally I fear I say it out loud but then, like Builder Bloke, you probably couldn’t have taken me and got away with it either!