When I found out that Lyon has an opera house that also puts on ballets, I knew I had to go at least once. I snagged tickets to Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky months ago. Me being below the age of 26, my ticket was only ten euros. This was my first time ever going to a real ballet performance, and I was looking forward to a brand new experience.
I definitely had a brand-new experience.
The empty red box of the stage was cold and uninviting. The dancers, in traditional ballet tutus (even the men), performed like twitching, reactive bird automata. Sometimes clockwork, sometimes fluid, never quite telling an actual story. At one point the dancers found (were given? stole?) a baby, and they did an optical illusion where it looked like the baby teleported across the stage constantly, from spasming hand to spasming hand.
One of the dancers found a computer control panel under a staircase and hit a big red button, killing (pausing? resetting?) all of the other dancers. That lasted until another dancer produced a life-sized doll of a child, and they all solemnly carried it around the stage. Something eventually spooked them and they all ran offstage to the right… then reappear stage left. They run to the right again, and reappear on the left again.
At this point they are all running out of sync. Some are dancing, others are sprinting, two over here are ripping down the drapes, this one here has found and put on tennis shoes, several completely undress while they run — tripping out of their underwear. They start ripping the set apart. After one bursts through the stage left doors, he rips them off the hinges and just high-tails it.
One of the naked men rips up the carpet and drags it around. The backdrop lifts up and we can see backstage. I mean, we can literally see the stage hands checking props and hanging up costumes, and the dancers are still running in circles destroying everything and going crazy. They start screaming in fear. Even though they are running in a complete circle that we can see, it feels like they are running from something. This goes on for maybe half an hour. The music is extremely intense and I start to get a stress headache.
Finally, a dancer in a torn dress walks slowly onstage in the opposite direction of the running, carrying a life-sized doll of an old woman. He moves its limbs like they’re slow dancing. All the other dancers disappear and the music stops. A completely naked woman comes to stand in front of him and carefully takes the doll, and he backs off. She sits in the center of the destroyed set and holds the old woman doll in her lap. AND THE CURTAIN FALLS.
Reader, I was shook.
Not for a single moment did I recognize anything from Sleeping Beauty. Some of the musical motifs were present, but that’s it. I was bewildered, occasionally frightened, and deeply, deeply confused. But at the end, when the curtain fell on the lone dancer with the old woman doll asleep in her lap, I did cry. I have no idea why. So, obviously this piece rendered an emotional response in me. I suppose that qualifies it as a success?
Whatever else it was, it was French.
Cordialement,
Allison
P.S.: Please find linked here behind-the-scenes videos from this production to get a better idea of what I’m trying to describe. Like, I’m begging you to watch these videos. Please share in my incomprehension.
Flan in France 