Last night I went to Diagliev and the Red Shoes by Ballet Ireland in the Cork Opera House. It was wonderful. I was seated in the “cheap seats” in the third row of the stalls, but that’s exactly where I wanted to be. You do loose the overall impact of the performance and you suffer a bit from “tennis watching” but you gain a wonderful insight into and appreciation of the strain and effort that a dancer goes through while performing. What I always love when watching a Ballet is listening to the soft clipping from movement of the pointe shoes, and this so much clearer near the stage.
The ballet was in three acts containing the following pieces: Les Sylphides, The Red Shoes, Le Spectre de la Rose, Dying Swan, L’Apres – Midi d’un Faune and Le Sacre Du Printemps. Les Sylphides was a wonderful opener. The ballerinas looked so pretty and graceful. The two pieces that I definitely enjoyed the most were The Red Shoes and Le Sacre Du Printemps. The Red Shoes had the most wonderful freaky shoe maker character, played by Michael Berkin (as detailed in the program although it did look more like Ethan Brookes). He was absolutely twanky! He doesn’t look as weird in the picture in the program, he’s missing some makeup. They must have twankified him during the tour! Indecently the red shoes themselves were well and truly battered from use! Le Sacre Du Printemps took up the entire third act. A very atmospheric production. It had an effective earthy pagan feel and for me, a touch of the Eloi and Morlocks. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Günther Falusy playing the God of Spring, he didn’t do much but sit in the background and look ominous, but he did it well! 
I really wanted take some pictures, just crappy ones with my phone. They made two separate warnings about the prohibition of audience photography so I kept my phone in my pocket. I imagined it was just a ban on “flash photography”, to stop the audience from blinding the poor dancers onstage with their crappy instamatics. I had a bad experience at a Jethro Tull concert before where I was snapping away all night and just as I was about to put the camera away I got a tap on my shoulder by a floor manager sporting a severe hatred for all things photographic. Everyone else was taking photos, even Ian Anderson on stage… monkey see monkey do. I was using an SLR with a big lump of glass on the end though. Enough of the digressions; most importantly I didn’t want to look like a cretin at the show but it would have been nice to have a few mementos to show now.
The only negative of the evening were the series of Martin speaker cabinets stage left. The music for the evening was all prerecorded, that’s one thing but when music is played through a blown loud speaker at high volumes it becomes distracting. It was at its worst for Le Spectre de la Rose in the second act where it seemed every note on the piano caused the poor cones dying voice coil to spit and splutter like a hornets nest. It wasn’t a major thing though.A great night anyway. Being so close to the stage reminded me of paintings of the orchestra by Degas, only instead of an orchestra I got a dodgy loud speaker :-)
