I took my daughter to see her first classical ballet at the end of January: Swan Lake, presented by the Moscow City Ballet at the Barbican. Ah, Swan Lake, that tragic and beautiful love story about a prince who is reluctantly forced by his parents to choose a wife from a selection of beautiful, simpering, international princesses. We’re off to a solid, feminist start. And yes, I know, Tchaikovsky was a genius who created beautiful art based on the expectations and culture of the time. 1875 Russia wasn’t exactly a hotbed of feminist activity. I get it. That doesn’t mean I want to expose my six-year-old to latent messages of women as giftable commodities. We get enough of that in modern advertising and in unspoken lessons at school that find the construction area of the room littered with phonics words like ‘dad’ and ‘tough’ and the home/kitchen area with ‘mum’ and ‘clean’. These messages are everywhere, they’re constant, and I’ll tell you what, it gets exceptionally tiring to spin-doctor the narrative of basic life in hopes of creating a space for my daughter, for all girls, to grow up feeling as worthy and valuable to society as the boys in her class.
Of course, spoiled millennial Prince Siegfried doesn’t want any of the unfortunate princesses whose royal parents dragged them across continental Eurasia on a several-months-long trip in god-knows what kind of horrid uncomfortable transportation. No, Prince Sieggy just wants to be alone. Because no one gets him. Well, no one except a bird. I don’t mean a bird as in, the cute British colloquial term for an attractive woman, although, in this case… (spoiler alert!) the bird is in fact an attractive woman. Or, more likely, a young girl; if I had to hazard a guess based on the standard so far, she’s probably about 13. So poor little Princess Odette, we learn, swans about by day, but gets to party all night as a real girl with real legs and no puppet strings! Now I’m mixing metaphors and folktales. Although technically, she does have a metaphorical ‘puppet master’ because she’s been cursed by the evil sorcerer, Von Rothbart. For no apparent reason. She probably didn’t smile when he complimented her or responded to his inappropriate photo message with a neutral emoji face. We’re still almost 150 years away from the #metoo movement in this ballet, so she sure as hell didn’t report him to any authority. So you’ve got to ask yourself, why so angry, Von Rothie?
Anyway, lots of conniving happens and for a while our ‘hero’ Prince Siegfried thinks the black swan is actually his beautiful white swan. I mean. I just can’t. Did you even look into Odette’s eyes, you materialistic knob? They’re polar opposites. As we would say in my mother tongue (Canadian), what a hoser. It’s all good in the end though. He figures it out, ‘rescues’ the right bird, and their love breaks the curse, meaning she can now be his human bird forever. Hetero-normative love conquers all.
Plot-rant aside, it was a very good performance. The Moscow City Ballet is one of no less than one of 18 ballet companies with the word Moscow or Russia in its name, so if you mistakenly thought Baryshnikov like I did, well, we were both wrong. The company is only 30 years old – in other words, too young to have ever hosted Carrie Bradshaw’s hunky Russian boyfriend on their stage – but the performance was lovely, the costumes were gorgeous, and the dancers seemed to float upon the water (a pond housing enslaved, miserable swan women who were being punished by a pouty incel…). Now, you might wonder, what does Anne know? I grew up in a city imbued with dance culture. We have the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Canada’s oldest ballet company and the longest continuously operating ballet company in North America. Winnipeg also boasts the oldest contemporary dance company, and the only African contemporary dance company in Western Canada. Students travel from across the globe to attend our dance schools. I mean, I only took ballet classes until I was 14, so I’m not saying I’m one to judge, but from an audience perspective, I’m one to judge. And the Moscow City Ballet was very good. I mean, I think my hometown ballet might win in a ballet street-fight a la West Side Story, but I tip my hat to the MCB.
In the dancers’ defense, I posit that perhaps the stage and venue set-up might have thrown off their game a little. The Barbican is not a dance venue. It’s a good venue – in fact, it was my first time visiting their main stage, but it’s not a dance venue. The stage floor didn’t seem to respond well to leaping dancers, occasionally making some sound like elephants when landing a beautiful, floaty leap. There’s also no direct access to the backstage area, so anyone sitting near the outside edges watched as the dancers filed through a door, then disappeared up some steps into the wings for a few seconds before appearing on stage moments later. Perhaps for future shows of this nature, the Barbican could invest in some curtains for those areas?
But here’s the reality about the ‘magic’ of performance arts and taking a six-year-old along. Just don’t do it. And before you tell me what a sophisticated and self-aware angel your six-year-old is, stop deluding yourself. I was like that too, until I took her to the ballet. She fidgeted. She wanted to know what time it was, every three minutes. She wanted to see where her friends were sitting (why did I tell her that her friends were there?). She was tired. She was hungry. She was hot, cold, scared of the dark, didn’t like the orchestra. This is a child who’s been coming with us to nice restaurants her entire life. She’d have a tough time choosing between a visit to a Castle Museum or Creepy Crawlies. Her favourite place to visit is Fountains Abbey. And yes, she reads Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls – you did read the rant above, didn’t you? So yeah, I thought she could handle the ballet.
I was wrong.
Okay, I exaggerate. It took her most of the first act to relax into it, but with a bit of prompting, she engaged with the setting, the costumes, and the idea of a magical swan princess. For the first hour, I felt myself cringe every time she coughed – which, given that she was recovering from a nasty cold, happened about ten times a minute. Still. She’s only six. And we were at a matinee full of children. I’m not saying that kids should run feral through the seats during a ballet. What I am suggesting is that she needed time and her own space to acclimatise to a new kind of cultural experience. If she needed to cuddle up on my lap and close her eyes to adjust to the lights and music, and whisper questions about the plot into my ear, so be it. I took her because I had wanted to create a cultural memory. One of those moments she’d look back upon as a sophisticated, intelligent adult and think, ‘Wow, this is why I’m so great. Because my mum took me to the ballet when I was six.’ At first it seemed like a big fat nope. But sometimes parents have to take a deep breath and just let our kids sort themselves out, find their footing in these places that have become familiar to us, where we know the rules and the expectations and how to play the game. In the end, we both loved it. My legs were numb after having her on my lap for two hours, and she coughed directly into my face about 3,000 times, so now I’m the one with the terrible cold. But neither of us will remember that in twenty years, when she accepts a Nobel Peace Prize for some great feminist achievement, one she can tie back to that time I took her to the ballet.
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