A Night at the Ballet

The culture: Sleeping Beauty, The Royal Opera House, London.

The cheap seats: £10 amphitheatre slips seats (purchased through their Student Standby Scheme: www.roh.org.uk/for/students). Distant but glorious.

I’ve been in love with ballet ever since I was a little girl taking classes in a pink leotard and cross-over cardigan. I still remember the pride I felt when I graduated from elastics to ribbons. Sadly though, I left my dance classes behind as I grew up. I’ve always secretly regretted it and I’ve recently resumed.

My first experience of ‘proper ballet’ was seeing a Russian company perform ‘The Nutcracker’ in a leisure centre where I grew up. It became Christmas tradition and we saw most of the greats (including ‘Coppélia’, which freaks me out to this day).

Last night I was so lucky to be able to make my first trip to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden for their production of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. It’s a well-known story so very easy to follow and even features a snippet of that song Disney made famous in their movie version (the woman behind me hummed ‘I know you I walked with you once upon a dreeeaam’ quite noticeably throughout this dance).

It was my first experience of ballet on such a large scale and it blew me away. Everything was just so beautiful, from the ornate high ceiling right down to the cellos in the Orchestra Pit.

My £10 ticket found me up above the fourth tier which was dizzying but I loved the bird’s eye view this offered me – looking down upon the masses of people (the theatre seats a whopping 2,256 people) and people-watching in the stalls (where people paid up to £122. I would much prefer to go twelve times at £10 than once at that price!). Once the ballet began I had a wonderful gaze over the stage – though from the side – which meant I could see everything clearly and admire the choreography from above. These tickets are sold as restricted view but I would call them ‘Alternative View’. Surprisingly, I was even able to hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet en pointe from my seat. It was awe-inspiring.

The night was easily the most magical I’ve spent in London to date. A wave of calm washed over me from the second the Orchestra struck up and started Tchaikovsky’s beautiful score. The dancing was stunning and it really took my breath away.

I left feeling like I was floating on air, covered in goosebumps, and with my hands aching from clapping so hard. I’m still baffled by the ballet’s applause etiquette though, comprehended only by the regulars in the Stalls. I think this will take me a few more trips to master – I can’t wait.

The problem of silence

Recently I have been spending a lot of time working, first on my 4,000 word medieval literature  coursework portfolio and now on revision for my summer exams. While this has sadly left me no time for gallery trips and evenings at the theatre it has given me a lot of time alone with my books and music as my only companions.

I love to write to old music – David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie et al. feature heavily on my Spotify working play list but after listening to many hours of this I decided to mix things up a bit and work to new music instead. I found Florence & the Machine, Ben Howard, alt-J and Haim set the right chilled tone for an Adam Bede revision day. The problem with needing music for revision is that I need endless hours of playlists to stop myself getting bored or, worse, hearing the songs so frequently that I learn all of the words and spend more time singing along (imagining myself, as in so many of my dreams, as a fourth super-cool Haim sister, for example).

Bastille are a band I had heard a lot about but never really listened to. I took a bold step and bought the album. I fell in love. It’s always hard to pick a favourite song from a stunning album like Bad Blood but I definitely have favourite lyrics. Among them are these from The Silence:

‘It is not enough to be dumbstruck;
(Can you fill this silence?)
you must have the words in that head of yours.
And oh, oh, can you feel the silence?
I can’t take it anymore,
’cause it is not enough to be dumbstruck’ – Bastille, The Silence

Everyone has moments when they are lost for words but I suspect that I have more than most. I have many moments of writer’s block (https://culturefromthecheapseats.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/writers-block), moments where I’m writing in full flow and suddenly can’t remember the word I need and moments even when I’m not writing that I simply can’t find the words.

Is it ironic that a student of language can’t find the words to say something? Is it her greatest tragedy? Learning to appreciate the beauty of the great authors’ phrasing leaves me without words of my own sometimes – with nothing but a head filled with clichés, empty and barren of emotion, worn out through repetition, and borrowed words from minds more eloquent than mine.

Sometimes silence is golden. It is even a literary device used to great effect (especially by post-colonial writers) by placing importance on what is unsaid and encouraging reading between the lines of printed, present words to find the absent ones. However sometimes it is ‘not enough to be dumbstruck’. I have the words in my head, or at least the thoughts waiting patiently to become words. Now is time to ‘fill the silence’ because although in the land of literature what is left unsaid is understood, in the real world one must simply find the words that are lost before the moment to speak them is lost too.

Especially when it comes to men…

(‘I could have saved so much time for us, had I seen the way to get to where I am today…I need to be bold, need to jump in the cold water…’ – Joshua Radin I’d Rather Be With You)