Sleeping Beauty

Sorry, sorry, a million times sorry for having neglected you: I have no excuses. Blogging is a commitment and it should be a golden daily rule, but my head was boiling for the last 2 weeks and I just needed to disconnect for a few days. Which I did quite well, judging by the messages I got on my voicemail when I turned my phone on this morning after leaving it off for three days.

I would quite like to tell you how blissful an out-of-the-world experience it was, but the 13 (doomed number) messages from my family I had to listen to on my way to work at 8am were not too far from spoiling it for me. That, and the hungover on hungover on hungover...on hungover I had to wake up through since last wednesday morning.

It is Christmas though, so no real way to escape feasty enibriation, and it is indeed a lot more fun than Christmas in a loving crazy family that has the miraculous privilege to drive you up the wall faster than you would be able to say 'anticonstitutionnally'...

I like Christmas when it is very scandalous, very unreligious, and very unconventional... so I will fondle this memory of the office drinks I had on Thursday, beginning with pub wine, minglixing with vodka orange, and ending with sambucca shots and beautiful colleagues passed out over the edge of a club's leather sofa arm, hair brushing the floor ever so delicately in the wavery fidgeting of early hours' drunkenness...

Since Friday was not a lot wiser, and I made it to bed on Saturday morning at 8am after about 6 hours of sleep in 3 days, you will understand why I woke up at 8pm on the Saturday night, and am now quite thoroughly jet-lagged without having had to go through the marvel of a cross-ocean flight.

Anyway, it is time to talk about more decent matters, least you might start thinking I am a drunkard, so I will tell you about the experience that came closest to my fashion senses during the last few days: Kenneth's MacMillan's adaptation of Tchaykovsky's Sleeping Beauty at the Coliseum on Charing Cross Road.

I had never been to a proper traditional ballet before, apart from the (very proper) ones I enacted myself when I was a clumsy kid who liked the tutu, the ballerinas and was the nightmare of my dance professor Madame Dame who found me way too remarkable in the midst of all her beautiful and gracious candy-haired pupils.

I had seen contemporary dance ballets and Russian ballets in the past, but a real 19th century romantic one, never, so when my flatmate offered to take me as a belated birthday present, I was so thrilled I never actually thought of asking what the performance would be exactly.

Consequently when the first bars sounded in the dim light of the theater, my first reaction was to try to figure out what Walt Disney universe I had suddenly fallen into. I would have never thought in my wildest dreams that 'Once upon a dream' was actually a Tchaykovsky composition, and still now I wonder how many times the poor man flipped on himself in his casket at hearing the shrill voice of an enamoured 5-year-old singing along Aurora and her Philip of a Prince Charming in a middle-class pinkish cozy living-room.

Past that, I will confess I fell totally in love with the social space because for once, instead of being full only of middle-to-advanced-aged cultured grown-ups as theaters usually are, the audience was scattered with very silent children, mouth ajar and eyes big like saucers, who took over the 2nd floor bar performing unlikely arabesques come the intervals. It helped me get back into a child's mind, and I think this is partly the reason why I enjoyed Sleeping Beauty so much.

However, ballet is quite an abstract experience compared to theater, and especially this one, in which I felt only the second act was truly dramatic and gripping. Maybe it is just because of all the thoughts that keep going round and round my head at the moment, but while a play can take my mind over completely from the first line to the last, this ballet found me weighing the oddest and most matter-of-factly things in my head (example: if you drink too much alcohol, do your fingertips get dehydrated?... I believe mine do).

Not quite enough action.

Nicholas Georgiadis's costumes were an absolute delight though, and I really liked the introduction of the languid jazzy booted cat couple and the tiered dress of Riding hood pursued on stage by a fur-headed pervert woolf. The first two acts were full of seventeenth century corsets with waspish waists and lacy decolletes, flowery half hoops brimming with pastel rose blossoms, and richly embroidered court dresses; in comparison the third act plunged you in a set dark with unfulfilled love, with black 18th century high collared dresses, haughty powdered hair and even higher top hats.

Three things that will stay with me for a long time: the untellable harmony of golds, peach, pinks and creams declined in the most incredible degrade on stage in the closing act, the wicked performance of the male Carabosse and her (his?) 4 humped servants, and the flirty ballet of virginal Aurora commanded to take a husband: I had no idea Sleeping Beauty was such a slutty flirt... I like her a lot more for it than I did the golden-haired Walt Disney princess!

Champagnista V