M’Love and I went to the Ballet on Sat evening.
Dracula, as performed by the Colorado Ballet Company.
It opened by suddenly dropping black upon the theatre seat with a loud crash of a snare drum, meant to be knocking. Trite, I thought, but the room echoed with the audiences surprise. The stage lit dimly and showed the opening credits as dance. A dream sequence, with Harker and Mina. They at the alter being separated by death. Walking together and she being attacked by a madman. They at the alter, this time her in a coffin. Very cleverly worked and it caught.
Throughout the first act, there seemed nothing but cleverness. They had breathed life into the staleness of a traditional ballet. The sets were almost constantly moving, and in Romania, the contact improv mixed into ballets forms was delightful. The villagers catching and eviserating a wolf, then parading it around was a pleasant surprise, as was the set for the castle.
Unfortunetly, the cleverness seemed only a device to draw you in, not anything that they would deign to continue with during the rest of the performance. After we meet Dracula, with his swirling movement and his amazing red cape, it drifts into a “pick-up-the-girl-and-twirl”. The second act, which opens on Lucy’s ball, was busy and uninteresting. You could watch the maid get her bottom pinched, and run around the stage away from the butler or the young girl who drank too much unnatended at a table who then gets sick, but they took away from the act. There were so many miniture plotlines to follow that as a chance for the dancers to solo, it was pointless. Lucy’s death, as well, was silly. The men, grieving at her death, flounced unapppropriately around in tailcoats, ridiculously flinging thier legs above thier heads.
The third act began as uninteresting as the second, though picked up considerably as the vampires danced in the Carfax Abbey Crypt. The resemblance to the local goth night was more than a little amusing and made the scene that much more fun to watch. All of the femmes wer put in large black wigs, and danced as if they were marionettes on strings. Lucy, now covered with blood and one of the undead, showed more skill here than in her solo in the second act. Dracula’s defeat isn’t worth mentioning, so I shant, as it really was dissapointing.
ALl in all, a wonderful, fantastic show with a grand first act, and an interesting third, but still, sadly, a traditional ballet.