Up a steep and very narrow stairway
To a voice like a metronome
[…]
Everything was beautiful at the ballet
Raise your arms and someone’s always there
Everything was beautiful at the ballet
I was pretty..
I was happy…
I would love to…
At the ballet…
For a very big variety of a reasons, I took a job ushering at the two local theatres downtown recently. This means I have a chance to be around cool artsy time people a lot and I see performances I normally would never think to go and see and…hey, I get paid for it. It makes for some very long days (Monday clocked in at about 16.5 hours by the time I got home),….and some of the shows may not be my thing (er…Monday…Monday was …not my thing)….but usually it’s proven to be a bit of chance to anchor back to myself in the general stress and insanity that seems to be life these days.
And yesterday was Ballet Victoria’s presentation of the Dancer Theatre of Harlem out of New York.
Now part of being an usher is making sure the theatre is prepped and the house is clean for the show to go ahead. Not the backstage part of course, that’s not our area, but the front of house part. So before every show a team goes through the house and does a walk through between every row of seats checking for any trash that’s been missed, any spills etc. And sometimes while we’re doing that, whoever is performing that night is doing sound checks or set-checks etc etc. So I’m up there with my colleague clearing the balcony ,and I suddenly look over my shoulder and realize that the dancers are warming up on stage. How did I know that? Because no matter how professional or high end up get, a studio-piano still sounds the same as every other studio piano for every dance warm up…ever.
I remember those warm-ups, though mine were never for ballet (more on that later), but my original tap studio had one of those somehow always-rickety always-not-quite-in-tune pianos that banged out our warm up rhythms before each class…
You don’t forget that kind of thing somehow…your heart remembers it.
The show was stunning. In a way that somehow made me realize I was crying. I’m still no sure why I was crying, perhaps it was a whole muddle of things trying to sort themselves out in my head. Or perhaps it’s just…what art done right does. Perhaps that’s it’s job, perhaps that’s what art is supposed to do.
I never wanted to be a ballerina, not even when I was little. Looking back, that was definitely something that played against me in my ever being a full-blown Dancer-with-a-capital-D (trust me, if you want to be a dancer you need ballet)…
But until I was standing there watching people watch the show last night, I genuinely forgot that while I never wanted to be in ballet, I genuinely like ballet. It’s…transcendent. It carries you off to a place where the impossible is effortless and even the most painful of stories can somehow still be beautiful. You could see that, in almost every face in the audience.
Very few things can do that.
But everything really is…beautiful at the ballet.