The Pittsburgh Tatler: “Sexy.” “Sinuous.” “Celebratory.”
Those are some of the words I can barely decipher from the scrap of paper I was scribbling on as I refused to tear my eyes from the spellbinding, mesmerizing, breath-catching Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre performance of Boléro.
2 comments:
I loved reading this article because the author writes so beautifully. AI like how she writes down her impressions as she watched. I will have to use that next time I watch a ballet. Ballets aare harder to understand just because you rely soley on the music and the expressive dance to tell the story. After reading a description of the dance, it made me want to go to the Pittsburgh ballet. I felt like I was there. It sounded like it was such a touching performance for the author because of the context in which it was set. Watching live theater in person is such an intimate experience “where hearts beat together as audience and artists occupied not just the same physical space but the same emotional space”
I had to write a paper in college about appropriation vs adaptation in Matthew Borne’s Romeo and Juliet ballet. It opened my eyes then, to how hard ballet is to write about, especially to an audience that may not be familiar with either the medium or terminology. I want to give kudos to the author of this article. They write very viscerally, providing enough details to both; imagine the movement and understand why they were impacted by it, without getting bogged down by superfluous information. Additionally, the language is kept simple, and thus made more accessible to a wider audience. Ballet is a medium with some cost inhibitions. It takes money to train in ballet, or attend the ballet. It is effectively a medium with a paywall. This sort of thing is unfortunate and lowers the medium's exposure to different audiences. The effect of this article, providing such testimony, is incredibly important to arts such as ballet which sees falling numbers and public interest as its accessible language, published freely helps to cast a wider net and hopefully engage more interest.
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