Quiet, Less Quiet

One of the things I love about the ballet, aside from the brilliance of restraint, balance, movement, musculature, is the silence. In between the swelling music, there is the absence of speech. Sometimes, as in The Red Shoes, which I saw last night (the ballet of the film of the production of the ballet of the fairy tale The Red Shoes, directed by Powell & Pressburger, 1948), there are exhilations, claps, harrumphs. But mostly, aside from the bodies, staged so brilliantly to glide past and over and around one another, there are no words. And not just images either, which we have too much of, something alive, and very quiet.

In this production, directed by Matthew Bourne, the stage curtain is a character itself, Technicolor lit in tarnished gold, flipping around to reveal characters dancing, weeping, torn between art and love. Or else sweeping menacingly towards the stage like a zoom. Framing lights like those of a pretend stage existing backstage - framing, too, the lights of a train. How can words do any justice to movement, to the instant, to bodies bending and holding and leaping. Next to me, two older women, attending by accident on the wrong day, made quiet vocalisations of delight at what they were seeing. One of them took a pain in her knee, dropped her hearing aides. I took sips of water, felt my coat warm on my seatback, saw heads moving in front of me, never became the eyes only in the dark that I’d have wanted to be. We never lose our own bodies completely in the enjoyment of art, but the ballet, going on, lets us want to try. How about that, Timothée?

In other news, if you are in the vicinity of Oxgangs Library in Edinburgh and fancy hearing me read and talk too many words, please come along.

(I talk when I am nervous, which is most of the time; I wish I was a ballet. Not a dancer but the whole thing, vanishing at the end of the run…)