Last Thursday, I had a final exam in Comparative International Law and a midterm in International Security. This, of course, almost killed me. Comparative International Law is not fun and if someone expresses recreational interest in the subject, you should treat this individual with great suspicion.
However, I pulled through because that evening, I had a ticket to see the Paris Opera Ballet in their closing night of Swan Lake.
I leaped on the metro at 6:45 only to encounter delays all the way to Bastille. After dashing out of the metro at 7:15, I lined up with everyone else to get through bag check and then got my ticket scanned and started up the stairs.
Here is where the Paris Opera fails: helping you find where the hell your seat is. There are no employees anywhere except at the doors, but when your entry door is #11, second tier balcony, and there doesn't seem to be a first balcony and the doors go from #9 to #12, all hope seems to be lost. I eventually found my seat by swallowing my pride and just walking into random doors until the usher didn't give me an eye roll.
I had the cheapest seats to the ballet, but they were the best seats for seeing Nureyev's Swan Lake. It's an awe-inspiring ballet, full of formations that are best seen from a bird's-eye-view, or as close as you can get to bird's eye. At the orchestra level you won't be able to see the circles that fold in on each other or the line changes that are made with military precision.
I'd settled into my seat that also had a great view of the orchestra, and it was then that I realized there was no curtain. The stage was open and empty, and when the house lights went down, the first person to appear was a man in a suit, who stepped into a spotlight on downstage right.
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Paris Opera. Due to a nationwide strike, tonight's production of Swan Lake will be performed with minimal sets and the soloists and corps will be wearing modified costumes."
This announcement was met with whistles and cheers of encouragement from the entire opera house.
The next three hours were full of the most beautiful ballet I've ever seen, accompanied by dancers awkwardly moving set pieces and wearing heavy leather character boots with fairy princess dresses. I may have said that the St. Petersburg Ballet Theatre was wonderfully in synch, but the Paris Opera Corps de Ballet might have been sharing their brainwaves. Everything from head position to arabesque height was in tune with each other. In fact, I was so mesmerized by the corps, that I'm not sure I paid enough attention to Odette/Odile or the prince. The lead soloist did have some incredible balances and the soloist in the role of the prince may have actually been flying? Unconfirmed. I appreciated the Swan Lake as done by the Paris Opera because it also explains some things in the story better. In other productions I've seen, the prince just sort of finds Odette and decides he's going to marry her. Paris Opera has the decency to include a scene where they actually speak to each other (in mime, of course) and Odette explains that she needs someone to marry her in order to break the spell. I like that just because it rationalizes Siegfried's insane decision to marry a swan lady he met in the woods at midnight. Additionally, Rothbart also takes on two personalities in this production--both as the evil sorcerer and the Prince's tutor. There's a lot of pas-de-deux in Nureyev's Swan Lake, from Odette and the Prince to the Spanish dance to the Prince and Rothbart doing some very impressive lifts with each other.
Paris Opera Ballet is an environment where everyone knows what you do when you go to the ballet. Unlike every other spectacle I've been to here, I didn't see a single person leave the production early. They gave the dancers five curtain calls, the applause was thunderous, and I left the Opera Bastille in a cloud of elation. That production of Swan Lake was so beautiful that I almost never want to see another production of Swan Lake ever again.
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