The Flames of Paris is burning at Tsimshatsui: the Bolshoi Ballet (巴黎火焰在尖沙咀燃燒:莫斯科大劇院芭蕾舞團)

No one who loves ballet can be ignorant of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet founded in 1776. In this year's HK International Film Festival, a selection of 8 of their productions will be screened including “Swan Lake,” “La Sylphide,” “Nutcracker,” “The Pharaoh’s Daughter,” “Don Quixote,” “La Bayadere” and “The Rite of Spring". But last night, we had a chance to see them live in Tsim Sha Tsui. They performed a ballet which is little known in Hong Kong: Boris Asafiev's "The Flames of Paris" about the French Revolution of 1789, based on the original libretto of Nickolai Volkov and Vladimir Dmitriev and as choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky upon that of Vasily Vainonen.

The Flames of Paris is a ballet in two acts each with 2 scenes.  In Act 1, scene 1, a large group of people are gathered: they are the revolutionaries on the way to Paris from Marseilles. The protagonist Philippe who longs to join the Marseillais, meets a peasant girl Jeanne and kisses her before her brother Jerome under the castle of the local seigneur the Marquis Costa de Beauregard who is returning from a hunt with his men and his daughter Adeline. Against her wishes, the Marquis tries to flirt with Jeanne until she is rescued by her brother eJerome, who is there and then beaten up and thrown into a prison cellar but Adeline who saw everything and feels attracted to him, frees him in the dark. Jarcasse, her father's spy obstensibly employed by him as her chaperone, sees everything and informs the Marquis and he smacks her and orders her into a Paris bound carriage,watched over by Jacasse. Jerome and Jeanne join the revolutionaries. The red-capped revolutionaries dance a Farandola .

Iphigenia in Tauris--The Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch

Once upon a time, singing, drama, instrumental music were separate genres. The Renaissance Italians combined them and produced the opera which reached its zenith in the works of Richard Wagner. Likewise music and dance used to be done one by one with no story to link them up until at more or less the same time when again, the Italians developed  them together into the mixed genre of ballet. But it had to wait for more than two centuries before it underwent another radical change, developing into something called the dance theatre in post World War I Germany, a form which grew out from the expressionist dance first developed by such choreographers as Rudolf Laban, Kurt Jooss, and Mary Wigman and such students of Jooss as Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffman and Wigman (Susanne Linke) who were all influenced by the concepts of alienation and the use of the chorus of such dramatic theorists as Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt who sought a new unity of stage design, music, choreography. We had an example of such a dance theatre at the Cultural Centre in the form of Iphigenia in Tauris by the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

Igor Moiseyev State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance in Hong Kong

Saturdays evenings are usually reserved for the delights offered by the HKPO. But last night, it wasn't them. From the Concert Hall, I moved a few steps to the opposite Grand Theatre. But it wasn't the question of a just a few steps. It was a leap. My heart and my pulses lept with the mainly Slavic dance steps of the Igor Moiseyev State Academic Ensemble of Popular Dance ( otherwise known as Moiseyev Ballet. According to a video clip on the U-tube, Igor Moiseyev was already a ballet master of the Bolshoi Ballet Company of Moscow when he was 26. But his career took a completely different turn when he started the first folk dance company specializing in folk dances of the entire world and became its principal choreographer.I don't know the details of how he did it. But he did it for more 70 years. He died at the age of 102 in 2007. He was credited with having invented a new dance style called "character dance", combining the dance steps of the traditional ballet, folk dance, acrobatics, athleticism and theatrics, a formula which proved eminently successful. It brought him not only to the Bolshoi Dance Theatre, but also the Red Square, the La Sacla of Milan, the Grand Opera House in Paris and the Metropolitan in New York. He won countless awards for his work. If I may judge from what I saw last night at the Grand Theatre, I  think he deserved them all. He was an indefatigable and endlessly creative choreographer, having created through the years more than 200 dances for his company. According to the Wikipedia, in 1953, he was named People's Artist of the USSR, in 1967, got the Lenin Prize for his "A Road to the Dance" , in 1876, declared in Hero of Socialist Labor in addition to four Stalin/USSR State Prizes (1942, 1947, 1952, 1985), Russian Federation State Prize (1996), and numerous orders and medals from his own country and from Spain and other countries and became the first Russian to receive the Order of Merit, First Class when he turned 100. In 2001, he was awarded the UNESCO Mozart Medal for outstanding contribution to world music culture. He died in Moscow in 2007.

I really don't know how to describe last night's performance. I'll probably run out of all the positive adjectives in my limited vocabulary in no time: magnifcent, spectacular, exquisite, great, superb, tip top, exciting, exhilarating and even humorous at times. Not only were the dance steps done in perfect synchronization with the rhythms in the relevant music (which spanned the full range Slavic and Latin world even including in one number, Chinese (!)) the costumes of the dancers  for both men and women were so colorful and the stage props were cleverly minimal, choosing to rely instead on the much more economic but no less effective use of intelligent stage lighting. We had a Russian dance (Summer), a Kalmyk dance, a Tartar dance (Ttarotchka), an Adzharian dance (Khorumi), a suite of Moldavian dances (Khora, Chyokylie, Zhok) some numbers from the cycle Pictures of the Past called "Old city Quadrille",  some dances from the choreographic picture called Partisans, an excerpt from the naval suite A Day on Board of a Ship called "Engine Room", A Bessarabian gypsy dance, a Chinese ribbon dance and two numbers from the Suite of Mexican dances called Sapateo and Avalulko, an Argentinian cowboy dance called "Gaucho, a dance number form a Nanayan play called "Two boys in a fight" and finally a Ukrainian dance called Gopak.

I can do nothing better to introduce this wonderful group of dancers than to provide two video clip from the U-Tube from which one may get a glimpse and a taste of what this remarkable group of extremely professional and talented group of dancers can do.

 

The Romafest Gypsy Dance Theatre in HK (魅力吉卜賽在香港)

I had a taste of Romanian song and dance last night at Shatin. When the show opened, we had a small group of musicians on the left of the stage: two violins ( one of which has only 3 strings, used not for playing melodies but only for complementing the rhythm of the main melodic line from the first violin and/or accordion) one viola (played surprisingly vertically, held upon its side between the chin and shoulder instead of upon the top left corner of the bat-like surface of its body!), one doublebass and an accordion and a male singer. They started playing a song full of minor notes. The the male voice sang in a deep voice with the kind of variation  somewhat like the glissando on the violin. What struck me instantly was how like the flamenco jondo style of singing it was. It made sense, the flamenco style moved West with the gypsies from Northern India.Whatever the true reason might be, after the singer had sung his soul out, there was a complete switch of mood: it became gay and exciting as he was joined by a troupe of male dancers all dressed in colorful floral patterned shirt and black trousers the same way and some female singers/dancers each in her own colorful flowing dresses with emphasized hemlines and fluffy underdress which they would lift from time to time but all with two ribboned braids one on each side of their shoulders. It's as if after lamenting the sorrow of leaving  their home thousands of miles away or some more recent misfortunes they've decided that there's enough of that sadness which is eating into their here and now and that they really must make a virtue of necessity and concentrate in making the most of their present and to find such ephemeral joy as they can the living present. I turned to the Programme Notes. That opening piece is called "Gelem, gelem--Gypsy Anthem", a song written by Zarko Novanovic which he himself calls "Opre Roma "("roma"" the Gypsy term for "human") , often used by gypsies in different countries as the anthem of the Roma. The song was written in 1949 after the Gypsies were massacred by the Nazis in the Porajmos (The Romani Holocaust in World War II) and was adopted as the anthem of the Gypsies everywhere in first World Romani Congress in 1971.

Momix's Bothanica (莫米克斯舞蹈奇藝坊的四季狂想曲)

Imagine a stage all dark. You hear some electronic music gushing out rhythmically with the steady beat of thumping bass notes from huge speakers somewhere. The bottom of the stage lights up. You see what appears to be some white gauzy cloths fluttering on the stage floor. From time to time, you see what appears to be a wave head about to crash. It subsides. Another wave head appears at another spot close by. It subsides too. And then another and then it's back to the always non ceasing flow again. The wave effect is in fact produced by the movements of certain dancers under that undulating cloth. That's how the dance of llght and dynamic visual images begin. It was done at the Cultural Centre last night by an extremely innovative dance troupe from America called the Momix in a production called Bothanica. .According to the programme notes It's "dance as illusion" and Momix is
an "avant-garde movement based troupe created by Pilobolus co-founder
Moses Pendleton in 1981. The groups is made up of 5 male and an equal number of female dancers.
During the show, called Bothanica, which is supposed to convey the changing moods and activities of the four seasons of the year in the order winter, spring summer and fall, the dancers sometimes dance solo, in duets, in quartets and in larger groups, with the help of silk cloth, flexible plastic tube with interior metal ring support, foldable silk flower on umbrella or fan like opening and closing mechanism or such mechanism with flower-or wing like feather opening and closing  on analogous principles. You see on the stage ingenious play of light. colors  and shapes like sunflowers and orchids, fountains, worms, centaurs, dinosaur, people in rituals of religious worship, the creation of the world or the coming and going of seasons etc.always synchronized perfectly with the flow and rhythm of the ethnic fusion music. It's the first time ever that I saw such a dance cum light performance executed with such precision and elegance. There really is no limit to human ingenuity and creativity. Our limit is the limit of our imagination. It makes me feel so blessed to think that I am part of the human race still able to join in the celebration of their talents.Credit must be given not only to the excellent dancers also to Costume designer Phoebe Katzin, the Puppet Designer Michael Curry, the Lighting Desinger Joshua Starbuck and the Production Stage Manager Corrado Verini for their imaginative creations and co-ordination.
Here's what the programme note says about each of the four session which contain different dance and image sequences:
Winter/Spring:  Aurora Rose the Dead of Winter, Cateraction, Geese Return Overhead Beckoning FantasyTree-Flower to Tempt Three Graces from the Foam to Taste the Pollen Snow And Fall Back into the Flow.  Loons Laugh in Darkness for Swans to Dream of Genesis and New Green. Fro ZEN Awakening Love from Above Delivers Persephone to the Subsoil Riding Old Bones to Romance with Ancient Stones. The Worm Turns Night Crawlers into a Sea of Green, Spring Pools, Marigold Bloom, Hornets Hop, Owls Hoot the Arrrival of Centaurs Amid Summer Night's Dream Fire Flies.
Summer/Fall  God's Hammer, August of Wind, Storms, Rain, the Beaded Web. INSEX Meet the Beetles and Egg On, Birds of a Feather to Drop Seed on Sun Flower. Finches Startled by the Avant Gardner as the Green Man is Leading the Charge of Indian Summer. Branches Gathering for Autumnal Ball. Last Leaf Catches the First Snow Fall. Cold River Runs Again But There's More a Solar Flare Tonight's Encore.
One can see from these hints the changes of images, action and the moods evoked in the choreographer's mind and heart along with the texture of the sound and rhythms of the different songs or pure music always playing in the background and guiding the movements on the stage. It's not a narrative, but rather more fragments of a narrative, joined not linearly, nor causally, but more like being juxtaposed and each proceeding along its own path simultaneously. It's not a display of depth but more of endless surfaces bumping into each other, joined for a while and then go their separate ways, as in Life and the rhythms of Nature.



Start of show and various excerpts

Other excerpts

Dancers performing with flexible plastic bands

Solo dancer creating images of movement and light reflection.

Dancers with feather wings switching from birds to flowers.


Play of light and shapes

Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet (普羅科耶夫: 羅密歐與茱麗葉)

Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet is one of the most endearing pieces of music he has written. It immortalizes one of the greatest love stories of all times first written of by Willliam Shakespeare in a drama of the same name in which two young lovers died because of a historical family feuds between two Veronese families, the Capulets and the Montagues in Renaissance Italy. Tchaikovsky too has written his own version of the ballet but last night I was able to see for the first time, a live performance of Prokofiev's 1938 version done by the famous American Ballet Theatre as choreagraphed by the very popular Sir Kenneth MacMillan.It gave me a much richer understanding of the nature of ballet music, which nowadays is often performed alone, without the ballet.  With the ballet, somehow, the music sounds much more moving. The prima donna role was originally supposed to be danced by Julie Kent but just before the performance was about to begin, we were told that she suffered an injury and her role was taken over by the Korean ballerina Hee So who would partner with Cory Stearns as Romeo.

The ballet was a fairly long 3 act affair: In Act I Scene 1  The Market Place, Romeo, a Montague who failed to win the love for Rosaline, was consoled by his friends Mercutio and Benvolio and got into a fight with Tybalt, a nephew of Capulet until stopped by Prince Verona; Scene 2, Juliet's afternoon in the Capulet house, when she played with her nurse after which she was presented by her parents to a suitor Paris; Scene 3, Outside the Capulet House when the guests arrived for a ball and Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio entered wearing masks so that Romeo might continue to woo Rosaline; Scene 4 at the Ballroom of the Capulets, Romeo was attracted by Juliet's dance but was ordered to leave by Tybalt but again Lord Capulet allowed him to stay;Scene 5 when Lady Capulet stoppedTybalt from pursing Romeo as he left, then the famous Scene 6 Juliet at her Balcony in a sleepless night, she was unable to forget Romeo but to her delight and surprise he appeared in the garden below. They declared their love for each other by another dance. In Act II Scene 1, when Romeo was looking a wedding procession and thinking of Juliet, he got a letter from her nurse in which Juliet told him that she would have him as her husband. He was overjoyed. Then In Act II Scene 2, they were secretly married at the Chapel and in Scene 3, there was another fight in which Tybalt killed Mercutio and Romeo avenged him. In Act III Scene 1 The Bedroom, Juliet's parents again appeared with Paris but Juliet would have none of him, her parents, not knowing that she was already married, got mad and threatened to disown her and Juliet had to seek help from the Friar Lawrence at the same monastery; in Scene 2, at the Chapel, Friar Lawrence gave Juliet a vial containing a potion which would help her to feign death. She took it at the family tomb expecting Romeo who would be tipped by Friar Lawrence to come during the night to take her away; in Scene 3, she was found apaprently lifeliess at the family tomb and in the following scene at the Capulet's family crypt, Romeo, not having got Friar Lawrence message and having got news of Juliet's death, entered disguised as a monk, found Paris there, killed him and then killed himself by swallowing poison. Then Juliet awoke, only to find Romeo already dead and proceeded to stab herself, leaving the stage with three corpses..

The performance was extremely well done: the action and the dances followed one another seamlessly from one scene to another. The mime ballet was blended into the action without any over-dramatization or overacting. Everything looked so natural. The atmosphere in general was one of subsued understatement, helped in no small measure by Nicolas Georgiadis's costume, predominantly in brown, yellow and dull red in the public scenes, which suffused everything with a feeling of warmth and the loose fitting flowing white shirt and dresses in the more private scenes, which may suggest the sense of personal freedom. The set was realistic but not burdensomely so. And they made excellent use of stage lighting which, thanks to Lighting Designer Thomas Skelton, was simply superb.The music by HK's Sinfonietta under the Charles Barker was totally unobstrusive. The hero and heroine acted and danced flawlessly. I particularly like the performance by Hee Soo, whose body seems completely boneless and who acted and danced the part of the vivacious lovelorn Veronese lassie with incredible innocence, sensitivity, feeling and perfection. All in all, a most unforgettable visual and musical experience.  But one could not help seeing in the production shadows of the famous Nureyev and Fontyn version of the ballet done by Royal Ballet decades ago. This is meant as a compliment, not a criticism.

Le Songe des Ballets de Monte Carlo

It is not easy to find the right kind of balance between the smoothness of the traditional classical ballet with the almost mechanical object like abrupt motions of contemporary dance. Yet we got that last night at the cultural centre from Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo which gave us a twentieth century version of Shakespeare's "A Mid-Summer Night's Dream" in 23 scenes.

The minimalist scenography , with just a few columns, some undulating cloth suspended above the stage, the top of a movable sphere, a simple oval-top bridge with a fully mounted side mirror, a door and two tree trunks by Ernest Pignon-Ernest with just sufficient to suggest the general ambiance of the various scenes, with magical lighting in red, green, blue, beige or white to create the feel of dreamlike atmosphere of Shakespeare's play of love and defiance of parental authority, is where the action of the dance drama unfolded on stage.I like the way Philippe Guillotel dressed the dancers as elves, fairies, artisans, peasants, magicians, clowns and noblemen and animals: medieval without being old fashioned, simple without being dull creating gentle tension with the bare body hugging tunics of the contemporary ballet dancers. 

The dancers were excellent. They conveyed amazingly well their their surprise, their anger, their fear, anguish, their longings, their repulsion, their joy and their frolicking humor in solos, duets, trios and in groups in movements which synchronized perfectly with music by Mendelssohn, Bertrand Maillot and Daniel Teruggi, which alternates between classical sounds and some 20th century sound effects which added tremendously to some of the comical dance movements choreographed for us by Jean-Christophe Maillot, who has been with the dance company since 1987. I like in particular Titania, the Queen of the Fairies whose body movements were so smooth that it looked as if she were completely boneless!. I also like the way Maillot spaced out the dancers each doing their own thing on the stage so that there are always parallels and contrast and variations between what is in the foreground and the background and never a dull moment. I feel so lucky to be able to watch and to experience this amazing blend of images, sound and movements. 

Sans Objets d' Aurélien Bory

What could one reasonably expect to find in a small suburban theatre hidden in the middle of nowhere in the New Territories on a cold spring evening, a night like last night? Never underestimate the forces of creativity! This is what I found. From whence did it come? And in what form? I'll start with the second question first.

The ingredients of creativity? Not much. Just some dozen or so mechanized rectangular metallic plates arranged in the form of a raised platform of equal regularity, another machine of three main parts, a round bottom, above which swivels an L-shaped body over which sits and turns another mechanical arm which looks like a gigantic old-fashioned news camera hood the side of which shows some bolts and nuts and some kind of tiny little meter or other of certain  devices behind it whose surveying, turning, stretching, dipping, sweeping, lifting, "catching" are remotely controlled by another man sitting incognito on stage left in a dark booth  the side of which is exposed to the audience and from which one could see a pair of hands manipulating what appears to be an I-Pad like control panel, another huge rectangular panel, another wooden "drawer" of about 5 feet square, two young men in black suit and tie on a white shirt, plus an enormous black plastic sheet. That's all. Imagine that. Try to keep the audience's eyes riveted on to the stage with just such unpromising and minimalist materials without yawning! Yet the artists succeeded in doing just that!

One may wonder how? Through ingenuity, through perfect timing, through precise control of the movements of the huge mechanical "beast" and the various panels of the raised platform, and the synchronized and oddly "mechanical" motions of the two young men, with the assistance of well-timed lighting and focusing and equally calculated use of sound and/or music. We got constant suspense, unending surprises, shocks and even humor! Traditions of years of French mime and the shadows of Tati and Charlie Chaplin seemed to fill the darkened stage. One could almost see the ghostly hands and the minds of the two artists directing the mechanical "beast" and the two "actors".  

It was not theatre. It was not circus. It was not mime. It was not dance. Any way, not just those in isolation. It was art involving theatre, circus, mime, and a curious dance between instrumental rationality, its imperious needs and the need of human beings to conform to it. One feels and quite literally "see" the pathos behind the subtle humor. Like the predominant color of the set, it was dark. It was excellent. Superb! The discursive mind always asks: what does it all "mean", as if art can be reduced into words, as if it should be mere Aristotelian mimetic "representation"!  Like all art, it "means" itself, what it "expresses" concretely on the stage. But if one insists, one may perhaps get a glimpse of it from the programme notes. There its originator and director Aurélien Bory says, "I wanted to introduce on stage an industrial robot strong enough to move the scenery, as well as the performers around. The machine becomes a fully-fledged protagonist. It is an articulated mechanical arm. It will be used as a "puppet"...in its dialogue with an ordinary contemporary man. It's as if today's man were composed of two facets: he is still on the human side but moves increasingly into technology...It is not a question of judging it, but of accepting it....People have always tried to cross the frontier between the living and the non-living through the imagination: this is true of objects to which you lend a soul, of the myth of a statue that comes to life, or even or many areas of science fiction...Are we not already mixing the biological and the electronic--i.e. the living and inert! We can observe a double movement: the robot tends to become humanized and the man to become robotized. Human risk becoming 'not so good' as the robot. Man will be forced to become 'technologised.' if he wants to stay in the race. In the past, to test his capabilities, he measured himself against the animals. Today, the challenge is in technology....The story would be: robots and men, what have they got to tell? It could also be mankind's capacity to adapt or the unexpected emergence of beauty...or the future of humankind after humankind or the simple pleasure of form. I'm not looking for laughs but I try to get humor to increase the tension. I show men in uncomfortable, unstable and unknown situations. Burlesque action occurs to add spaciousness, a sort of 'no, this is not quite serious' " 

The performance was given at the Kwai Ching Town Hall by Oliiver Alenda, Oliver Boyer. Entitled "Sans Objet" (Without Object/Purpose/Aim/Useless), the project was conceived, designed and directed by Aurélien Bory and the "Robot" was programmed and operated by Tristan Baudon, its original music composed by Joan Cambon and the lighting designed by Arno Veyrat and the stage was designed and built by Pierre Dequivre. All from the country I spent some of the best years of my life:France.  Bienvenu. C'etait merveilluex! Merci beaucoup, mes amis ! A la prochaine!

A Streetcar Named Desire From Hamburg

Tennessee Williams is a household name in theatre. His Streetcar named Desire, written in 1947, won the Pulitzer prize for drama the following year. It's a story about the life of a middle-aged belle Blache Dubois with fading charm tortured by loneliness, by desire for love and an "exaggerated" need for gentility who could not bear the harsh realities of life and who ended up in a mental asylum after her first husband, Alan Grey, a homosexual who committed suicide, died, had a number of meaningless affairs with men including a delivery boy and a 17-year-old student for which she was dismissed as an English teacher in the town she came from, Laurel and which was what brought her to meet her younger sister Stella in the French quarters of New Orleans, where the play began. There she was warmly welcomed by 25-year-old Stella, married to Stanley Kowlaski, a physically strong working class man with whom she had tempestuous sex, had her hopes for a second marriage dashed after Stanley revealed her past, which he learned from a co-worker who frequented Laurel, to a would be suitor Mitch. The roughness and uncouthness of Stanley bothered Blanche and in turn, he could not stand Blanche' affectation to old Southern gentility of a "belle". Eventually, the animal-like Stanley raped her after getting drunk but Stella refused to believe it. This completely shattered Blanche's life. When the play ends, she is being forcibly led away by a cold and business-like nurse to a mental institution but Stanley continued a poker game with his buddies, as if nothing had happened. It was a powerful drama of the tragedy of a woman buffeted by the uncontrollable forces of life, by conventional morality, by the violence of sexual desire and perhaps innate male aggression and her need for some sort of acceptable "self-image" in the immediately post-war society of the old American South. Stella lives in Elysian Fields Avenue where runs a local streetcar named "Desire". The play has since been adapted for Broadway, for cinema, for opera and television and since 1983 for ballet, choreographed by John Neumier, who had been with the Hamburg Ballet since 1973. His latest production include Purgatorio and Liliom, premiered last year. Neumier is also the founder of the first National Youth Ballet in Germany.
 
I saw Neumier's production of the ballet adaption of Tennessee's play at the Cultural Centre on Sunday evening. It was a rather mixed experience. I saw how in modern ballet, the stage is quite minimalist, how every thing is merely "suggested" by carefully placed "hints", e.g. window shutters, doors, cloth background and how mood is suggested by lighting and how all action e.g. embrace (affection), push (rejection), piling up of two bodies barely touching (the love act), is done through thoughtful but formalized "gestures" . The ballet is a typical postmodern mix of "images", of criss-crossing of different dancing styles from different periods and cultures: traditional "classical" ballet steps, jazz, modern dance and even some hip hop moves. There were solos, duets and plenty of group dancing running not merely as background but in parallel, presumably as a kind of cool and distancing juxtaposition to increase the dramatic tension.

Neumier chose to reverse the order of the play which he did in two acts, starting with Asylum scene first and then working backwards to New Orleans in the following order:
Act I: Belle Rêve (Beautiful Dream and Blanche's ancestral home which she sold) consisting of her snippets of Blanche's flash back memories, Men, Her Wedding at Belle Rêve, her husband Allan Gray, the tragic end of their wedding day, Belle Reve falls into decay, Flamingo Hotel
Act II  End of the line, Blanche remembers the visit to her sister Stella in New Orleans, Stella changed, Conflict with Stanley, A Rescue Attempt with Stanley's friend Mitch, Blanche's past is laid open by Stanley, Flight--to where?, Rape, Stepping out of reality, Asylum.
The ballet ends where it began and came full circle with a detour through Blanche's memories.

What I like best is the lighting and the way the director used color of the minimal costume ( principally black and white) in the scenes at Belle Reve. I also like the way Blanche reminisces her past by taking out stuffs from her suitcase and whenever she wants to feel particularly "cultured", the way she caresses her fluffy but cheap feather-like neck "ribbon". The dancers were also good, often following the mood and the rhythms of the relevant music, which conveys also a strange juxtapositioning of classical themes, modern discordant notes and even hints of "jazz". They were extracts taken from Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives, Op 22 and Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony.  The principal dancers were Carolina Aguero, Silvia Azzoni, Thiago Bordin, Hélène Bouchet, Otto Bubenicek, Carsten Jung, Anna Laudere, Anna Polikarpova, Edwin Revazov, Alexandre Riabko, Lloyd Riggins and Ivan Urban. It's always interesting to  experience how one artistic media may be dramatically transformed into another through different artistic perception and sensitivities and how drama may be turned into a kind of mime-ballet. I never cease to be amazed by the almost acrobatic skills required a modern ballet dancer. It's not a life which any one can follow, only those really dedicated. My salute to them for a very enjoyable evening, away from all the worries of work.!