Varna’s Swan Lake — A Review
“You know the thing about writers… you see the world for what it is; you tell us the truth,” she said; her lipstick had seeped into her teeth, and she looked about eighty: she had some sort of a yellow-and-eggshell cloche hat atop her grey head, some sort of a yellow-and-eggshell houndstooth stitch; she wore some sort of a yellow-and-eggshell long, woolen coat, some sort of a yellow-and-eggshell houndstooth stitch; she wore pitch-black pattern-less pants, a matching black walking stick in her left hand’s grip. She looked like she’d lived a while, and she knew how to do it.
It hadn’t been difficult to see that she was fascinated with the poor, brown little girl who’d travelled across the continent to study at their prestigious Creative Writing School. “How courageous of you, my dear!” she’d reacted, “we know people who go to your school!” after I finished telling her what the fuck I was doing there, in that theatre in Norwich, and in Norwich, and why on Earth had I never watched a live ballet performance before. “I’ve only been here three months,” I’d told her, omitting the fact that those tickets cost an arm-and-a-kidney and that that was the real reason why I’d never watched a live ballet performance before, “I go to UEA.” “And what do you do there?”, she’d asked, “Creative development? Oh!” , in response to my “Creative writing!”— “Mum’s hard of hearing; she reads lips!” interjected her daughter who was sat to her right, and who mouthed “Cre-aayy-tive Wraaiting” to my neighbor — after which she’d proclaimed, “You know the thing about writers… you see the world for what it is; you tell us the truth.” “There are so many wars happening. We wouldn’t know what was happening at all if not for you,” she continued.
I nodded, wondering what my loyalties were to seeing the world or telling its truth.
It is true that I’d never watched ballet being performed live, but I knew that the dance involved music above everything else, the way I’d taken it in on the tele. And here I was squeezed next to a woman who couldn’t hear: how do you plan on watching the ballet, Marel? (“My name’s really unusual — Marel. I’m named after my grandmother, Mar from one, and El from the other. One of my grandmothers is English, and the other is Italian, so you can see I come from all over the place. Where do you come from?”).
“We will start in three minutes” came the announcement from backstage; we were four rows away from the stage, meaning that our necks were to suffer the brunt of a bad performance. “We love coming here; it’s so grand!” Marel had mumbled, somewhere between the half hour conversation that we’d had before the curtains rose. I suppose it was grand in a way. High roof, velvet red curtains pouring down into their golden tasseled ends. The ceiling speckled with bluish-white lights, possibly made to imitate the night sky but judging by the space between each bulb were more for a theatric effect. Rows upon rows of well-dressed Whites waiting for the music to begin. It could be construed as grand in one way.
“Would you like to come visit us? We stay at — -(couldn’t understand what she said over the din) — in an English house. Would you like to come see an English house? Will you go home for Easter?” she asked rapidly, exciting herself at the prospect of having someone — or me? — come visit them at their English house. Before I could respond, she reached for a piece of paper from her little black bag (another matching accessory!), and barely glancing at what was written on the paper, started noting down something.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Swan Lake!” went the announcement, and the lights dimmed quickly, the curtains rose quickly — I wondered what the rush was about — and on stage was a boy in sequined, velvet, midnight blue, white tights, holding a brown, large book in his right hand, flipping the pages ever so delicately with his left as a screen set into the back of the stage played a summary of the story so far. Marel kept writing in the dark for the first fifteen minutes of the show, probably her name, and her address for me to come visit over the Easter break: she couldn’t read my lips in the dark, and there was no point in trying to make her stop and watch the show.
I remember getting angry. The first half an hour of the show was just spent in anger at how ridiculous the performance was. A bunch of poorly co-ordinated people in tights, cheap-colored tulle skirts, and the worst expressions (or the lack thereof) on their faces, as they bounced, and pranced, and leaped, and skipped across the stage. I didn’t understand the point. It felt, by far, the worst lie fed to us by our colonialists that this was a dance worth imitating, a dance worth shoving down our throats for its superiority — I remembered while it was on that I’d spent years in school wishing I’d been thinner and could dance about like these ballet artists we saw in the films, read about in our books — it was nothing like I’d imagined it’d be. It felt like a glorified Indian school annual day performance; I couldn’t understand the applause. Where was the story? Where was the story being told throught their eyes? How could this be anything like our own dances back in India, which had so much life, which were unquestionably art and expression? I refused to bring my palms together for something that shoddy and meaningless.
The music went on and on; the dancers kept coming on stage and doing their little nonsensical routine. They fumbled frequently; their legs shook; they seemed to be a second away from falling on their faces, the stress from the balancing visible on their faces, their thighs, their heaving chests. To me, a novice ballet critic, it felt like ballet was about precision, it was about flawless, graceful movement. It had to be about co-ordination, it had to be about the dancers — the swans — merging into one unit, with their movement. It couldn’t be good, if they were so ridiculously disjointed that I was forced to look at the face of each of the dancers and decide which dancer was individually good, if at all. I hated that I was aware of each of their faces and their movements. I hated how aware I was of how cheap their outfits looked, how bare their faces. And I felt cheated. I felt the weight of my forty something pounds on my pocket. Marel, on the other hand, clapped for all.
And then the curtains fell.
“Is it over?” I mouthed to her, as I felt around for my bag. “Oh, no. This is what you call a break. They’ll come back on after,” she replied, smiling at having explained to me how it works, and ignoring my dejection. “What did you think of the ballet?” asked my neighbor on the left, a burly woman dressed in black stretch cotton set around her in waves that floated from her neck to the floor. “Oh, I’ve never been to the ballet before,” I told her, trying not to start shitting on the performance right away and hurt her White sentiments. “Oh, me too! The last time I’d watched Swan Lake, I was a child. Did you understand what was going on?” she ventured. “I didn’t understand as much as I didn’t like it,” I braved. “I get it. It’s not very clear to me either,” she confessed. We flattened ourselves to the back of our chairs as people climbed past us to go get their snacks.
“Would you like to have ice cream? I can buy you an ice cream. I can give you some money to buy ice cream!” said Marel, a toothy, red and white grin and a dreamy expression. “Oh, no. Thank you! I had a heavy dinner,” I point at my stomach; I immediately felt like a poor, brown girl who lied after receiving a rich, white offer for ice cream — It’s different that I’d polished off 3/4th a pizza, a can of Rose Lemonade, and a gigantic chunk of carrot cake an hour ago, but the guilt of “lying” was sudden and hovering in the air. Then I saw that everyone was eating ice cream from these little cardboard boxes outlined in gold. “Is it a thing? Eating ice cream at the ballet?” I asked Marel. “Yes! But I can’t have any, ’cause I couldn’t have my dinner. We packed half my dinner; I’ll eat it when we go home,” she said. “No, it’s not a thing eating ice cream at the ballet,” rescued her daughter, “it’s just a this theatre thing.” “I should probably go have some anyway!” in a sudden spurt of enthusiasm, I jumped across the three people to my right and slid up to the ice cream vendor. “Do you want money?!” called Marel.
The curtains rose once again. The dancers were now dressed in feathers. Out went the cheap tulle, in came the soft, white feathers, and the silvery tiaras, silver swan wings atop each ear of every dance.
And that is when the actual ballet began.
I do not know what possessed the dancers of Varna as soon as the tulle got stripped off them and they got sheathed in silvery, white leotards, the feathers, and those buns of hair. But the dancers suddenly merged into a single wing of a swan; they flew across the stage. You couldn’t tell them apart at all; their faces powdered in thick white, their lips reddened identically. They ceased to be single people doing their little dance; they became a part of the whole, they danced together, they bent, and waved, and glided across the stage like they were floating on air as one; they spun and spun, half a hundred pirouettes, half a thousand pirouettes, the floor opened to dozen paper planes, a dozen snowflakes. The only way you could tell Odette apart from the rest of the swans was by the feathers over her ears, and a different tiara, but it took a while to even figure her out amongst the dozen swans on stage. This was probably what Varna was about; this was probably was ballet was about.
On and on they went, as the music changed. On and on they danced. Odette embodied everything I’d visioned about ballet. Her legs never quivered, not once. Her form was perfect, both as the white swan and the black one (Odette and Odile). It was perfection. There cannot be any other word to describe this dancer, she was perfect. And forget her form, her face was the only one that told the story; a mix of pain, and longing, and despair, and pride, and love. She was everything, she was what I’d paid with my organs to watch. The symmetry was all at once alarming, all at once calming. I got lower and lower in my seat as they painted the stage with the tips of their toes, not falling once, not worrying me about their falling, but just… being. It felt like I was one with them, too, a smile on my lips as their went at each other, as the swans were lifted off stage, as the swans were twirled around in the arms of the prince. Such grace. Such poise. Such… weightlessness. That’s right. That’s exactly what ballet was about. The weightlessness.
“Will you be okay going home? We’d love to have you come visit us at our English house!” said Marel, as we milled around the exit door. The thousand of us fitted inside the Norwich Theatre Royale burst out of the doors onto the dark streets all at once, pushed through the two doors that lead us into the outside world, and we split into pairs and groups, as hunted for our cars, called our cab drivers.
And I cycled back, in the cold, and through the puddles on the cobbled streets. As I cycled past the dark storefronts, the odd shivering body here and there, and the quiet of the night, the spirit of what I’d just witnessed possessed me and I increased the pace at which I cycled. On top of the next hill, I lifted my body and stood on the peddles. And then down we went, the cycle and me, hill after hill after hill.
And in that moment, I was weightless too.
Truth about the world.
