Leon, Lightfoot / Van Manen

So I’ve skipped a whole bunch of operas and ballets that I have attended since coming back from Argentina in January. These ranged from quite good (Dvorak’s Rusalka and Strauss’ Die Fledermaus, my first operetta - note to self: love the genre, need to see more of it!) to predictably classical (Verdi’s Otello) and even borderline pornographic (Chostakovitch’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk).

On May 20, I went to see three new ballet pieces at the Palais Garnier here in Paris, Leon, Lightfoot / Van Manen. The first one, Sleight of hand choreographed by Paul Lightfoot and Sol León to Philip Glass’ Symphonie # 2, was, in my opinion, nothing short of incredible. It felt like a ballet version of the 2006 movie The fountain (except that I did not fall asleep this time - granted, the ballet lasted 20 minutes instead of an hour and a half): beautiful, even breathtaking at times, and probably full of symbolism none of which I got. The only thing that I did not appreciate about it was that there were two roles, performed by a male and a female, which were 100% symmetric except that the female gets stripped of her clothes at the end while the male does not. Seriously?.. I find that such pointless exploitation of female nudity inevitably cheapens whichever context it appears in. On the plus side, the choreography was really spooky and unique, and Phillip Glass’ (Glass’s?) music was hauntingly beautiful even pre-recorded.

Sleight of Hand. Image credit: Agathe Poupeney for OnP

I don’t have much to say about the second piece, Trois Gnossiennes. The third one, Speak for Yourself, started off really weird (the audio thing in the beginning - what the hell was that?..) but it did have a really cool visual effect of a rain later on:

Speak for Yourself. Image credit: Agathe Poupeney for OnP

Normally I am not a huge fan of these super-contemporary-conceptual types of performance art (Goecke / Lidberg / Cherkaoui that I watched in the same opera back in winter was a nice evening, but left no lasting impression, I must admit). The Sleight of Hand, on the other hmmm hand, was a rare jewel!

My final highly subjective verdict: 8/10 (more precisely, I would give the first part a 10, and not bother rating the rest)

XOXO

Olga