modern ballet
Sunday, February 1st, 2009We went to see a mixed show of modern ballet at the Royal Opera House last night.
Matt was very excited by seeing Martha Wainwright singing for a Will Tuckett interpretation of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. Martha had her big smoky American voice out for the night, though of course she was still miked up, unlike opera singers who would have been hurling their voice out there out of their big fat lungs. She sang the lead role of Anna, while Kristen McNally danced it, a story of a woman moving through a sordid neon world of stockings and suspenders, nightclubs and glamorous temptations.
Then there was a ballet of Carmen, with a rearranged version of Bizet’s opera score. There was lots of witty dancing based around animal mating, such as when Carmen and José dance around each other yapping like dogs, or all the men dance around the girls wiggling their bums like peacocks.
The last ballet was very special, a ballet called Danse à grande vitesse, based on Michael Nyman’s MVT: Musique à grande vitesse, written in homage to the new French high-speed TGV train in 1993. The ballet was suitably modern and energetic, the dancers wearing simple abstract outfits and leaping their way through to an exciting vibrant percussion-heavy finale.