Review: Swan Lake

It is highly misleading to note that the high point of the performance was when one of the ushers pounced on the annoying guy with the digital camera at the edge of the balcony and confiscated it towards the end of the first act. Misleading, because no matter how excellent the performance, the resulting delicious mixture of self-rightious schadenfreude would have trumped it. (She pounced during one of the longer pauses for energetic applause, so the act didn't disturb anyone's viewing enjoyment.)

The Perm Ballet's Swan Lake was an enjoyable, if somewhat relentlessly traditional, take on Tchaikovsky's classic. In some ways, it reminded me of how much Odette tends to be the very archetype/stereotype of the classic ballerina, little white tutu and all. The swan corps' interpretations were heavy on graceful elegance, leading my date to recall wistfully a version she'd seen where a bit more of swans' aggressive nature came through, with the flock actively (but, of course, unsuccessfully) running interference for their queen. Overall, what we got last night was a lot of very excellent dancing -- particularly in the second act where the various "ethnic" dances fit naturally into the story-context of the ball. Two comments on the costuming. On the down side, the "little white tutu" was interpreted here with a very thin, extremely stiff effect that came off like a flat disk sticking straight out from the swans' waists. Didn't work for me. It was particularly unaesthetic on Odette during lifts, when the skirt tended to pop out sideways in peculiar ways. On the up side, the evil magician's cloak was absolutely droolworthy. (Slightly more than a full circle with feathered effect on the lining and stiffened extensions along the front edges to do wing/flying effects with.)

Water long under the bridge

So I finally got my website-based-email passwords reset so I could go in and figure out what was going on. The answer seems to be that at some point the default behavior of the account changed so that messages got kept in the server's in-box even after being redirected to my default account. So I had a couple year's worth of messages clogging up the works (including, in the case of my catchall account, vast amounts of spammage). But there also seem to have been at least a few messages that never seem to have gotten redirected in the first place (particularly a bunch from March 2006). Either that or I've simply forgotten them and didn't keep a file copy. Sigh. Well, pretty much all of them were the sorts of random research questions that I wouldn't have gotten around to anyway. But I guess I need to schedule at least a once a month visit to the server's web-mail site for housekeeping.

On the to-do side, I finished the lacing eyelets on the new doublet and drafted and cut out all the fabric for the over-gown for the feast.