A Night at the Ballet

The building of the Opéra Garnier is baroque enough to cow anyone afraid of crown moldings into submission. If you're allergic to gilt--or bourgeous guilt--this is not the place for you. Get out. Or the ushers will chase you out with their €12 programs.

I, however, was cordially led to the velvet chair waiting for me in loge n° 20 and tried not to fall out of it looking at the ceiling, which was painted by Chagall. The elderly couple in front of me were reading the newspaper, as though going to the Opéra were a regular Tuesday night occurrence.

Unlike them, however, my understanding of ballet is composed of vivid sequences from Black Swan and dim memories of performing pliés in Madame Meacock's kindergarten dance class. I also regularly mix up dressage vocabulary with ballet vocabulary, which is bad because ballerinas are not horses. I don't think I've ever sat through a ballet in its entirety. Now that I have, I don't think I want to see another, at least not a traditional one.

We're somewhere between Mother Russia, a Turkish harem, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, although La Source is ostensibly supposed to take place in a desert. My understanding of the plot is a little less clear. Pretty ballerinas tiptoe in clouds of Swarovski crystals and tulle. A regiment of fur hats marches across the stage with an enormous Japanese lantern that opens up to reveal a Turkish princess. Sparkly blue men wearing paint instead of costumes kick up their heels. Puck runs in from Athens and wreaks glittery green havoc. Sad Ballerina is sad because Poor Hunter We're Supposed to Like Because He Hasn't Enough Euros to Buy New Clothes loves Japanese Lantern Girl and not her, even though Japanese Lantern Girl had him strung up in tassels and left him for dead. Sad Ballerina dies so that Japanese Lantern can buy Poor Hunter a new coat. Also, fights that leave me unconvinced of the pirouette as a viable form of combat.

In general, I think I'm just unconvinced by ballet. I feel like I'm missing the language necessary to understand the gestures of the body on stage, so it just seems false to me. Too rehearsed to be passionate, too formal to be innovative, too gestured to be credible. It's insufficiently extreme: I want it to be either so abstracted that every scene is a tableau of pure form, movement so divorced from reality as to be symbolism. Failing that, it should at least tell a convincing story, but in this case, at least, it was far too simplistic to be enjoyable. There are no justifications given for why one sparkly young ballerina deserves my sympathies, or the love of the young hunter, over another. Our sympathies are intended to fall according to wilted old tropes: the poor hunter must be good because he's poor. So instead of being psychologically rich, in this ballet, characters are defined by singular traits, some of which I find repulsive, and the ballerinas didn't dance with their partners so much as get carried around like objects (or lanterns).

What I did like: every single dance with Puck in it, the sparkly little green guy, because he and his cohorts practically bounced off the stage, they were so effervescent. And the visuals; the whole spectacle was an exemplar of visual cohesion. I wish I could have taken pictures of the stage--the decoration was truly excellent. They managed to fill up this cavernous black space with enormous tassels, falling in tangles from the ceiling or twisted together into trees. The tassel motif was even repeated in the headdresses of the traveling handmaidens, whose wardrobes I would have very much liked to steal. Although I think there was enough brocade on stage to upholster Versailles.