My big-arts weekend

This weekend is my "big-arts" weekend: Ballet AND opera.
It started last night with the WA Ballet's production of Red Shoes.
Another offering of clumsy tripe from artistic director Simon Dow. He fills the stage with distraction and buffoonery and steers away from the grace and elegance that is meant to characterise this particular form of dance. I'm not a boring traditionalist when it comes to performing arts but for crying out loud I want to see grace, skill and poise, not boys acting drunk on stage.
That said there were some beautiful pas de deux - especially the blatantly homoerotic sequences during the "opening night" scene.
I am sure I am not the only person sighing heavy with relief that this was Dow's last production for the company. This was as disappointing as his Dangerous Liaisons, only with better costuming. I think his lack of ability/originality was betrayed most clearly by the Don Quixote/Midsummer Night's Dream double bill of a few months ago. His effort with Quixote was staid and dull. Chrissie Parrott's choreography for Midsummer, however, is still being raved about. For that production, as with this, the set by Joseph Mecurio and the costuming by Leon Krasenstein were spectacular and original.
Dow has also just hired a miss-match of seven new dancers, which helped greatly to make last night's show appear more like a high school production than a performance by our state's premier/only ballet company. No one seemed truly comfortable on stage together, let alone dancing together.
Still, Red Shoes offers Jacinta Ross a nice and deservedly juicy role for her last show before retirement. (Even if her pregnancy means the choreography is necessarily tame compared to Helpmann's famously spectacular sequences from the old film).
Red Shoes had about three dozen short segues between dance routines that involved clumsy acting and miming, rather than interpretation through dance. The clumsy acting I can handle (hey, I am an opera fan, remember), but the miming just looked ridiculous. Either give the words voice or don't attempt them at all. There is nothing more ridiculous than a boy in a lycra bodysuit pretending to shout at another boy in a lycra bodysuit and the only noise is the percussion section getting sweaty down in the pit.
The WA Symphony played brilliantly, by-the-by. I hate that I can't see them down in the pit when they play His Majesty's. Afterwards my friend Rachel actually asked me what I thought of the production and I pretty much said the above.
"But you're really only here to hear the orchestra anyway," she said. So insightful. At least with the ballet if the dancing leaves something to be desired, there is always the music. (And legs in tights, too. We can't under-sell that).
Tomorrow I am off to see Manon (Massenet's, not Puccini's) at the Australian Opera Studio. It's a fully staged opera with some great young singers but it's three hours with a piano filling-in for an entire orchestra. I'm not sure how that sits with me. I'll let you know.