What comes to your mind when you think of ballet? If you’re me, you thought of little girls wearing tutus dancing on their tippy toes, occasionally tripping every once in a while because they are trying to perform moves that shouldn’t be humanly possible. I never thought to myself that I would enjoy watching a ballet performance.
My thoughts changed when I got to see a performance of Sleeping Beauty at the Mikhailovsky Theater in Saint Petersburg. If anyone can convince a ballet hater to see the beauty of ballet, it’s the Russians.
Sleeping beauty is a story most people know – a prince comes along to wake up a sleeping princess with a kiss, and they live happily ever after. Hardly something you’d think could be expressed as a 3-hour long story, much less through dancing! But when you’re a genius like the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, anything is…show more content… Striking, even. The mood in the crowd shifted from delight to gasps when the villain, Carabosse, appears and curses the princess to death. How the crowd was on the prince’s side when he works with the Lilac fairy to fight against Carabosse. And the final wedding scene – breathtaking.
When the show was over, the entire crowd was cheering and applauding. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced any other show or experience get a longer applause than the one the crowd gave here. at one point I thought it would never end. But can you blame the crowd when they just witnessed an authentic Russian ballet performance?
If I had to describe the performance in one word, it would be “graceful.” Graceful, but at the same time powerful. Dozens of dancers were leaping back and forth, spinning and flowing in ways you never thought human beings could move in. They made it look so easy; but I’m sure if I tried to move like them I’d rip my hamstrings and fall on my face. I couldn’t even begin to image the amount of hard work, effort, and dedication these dancers put into their
