A spooky ballet…

…or at least I wish it had been. Ben and I went to see the Nashville Ballet perform “The Bell Witch” last Sunday. When I was a kid, I used to love researching the different Bell Witch tales. I’m sure no one checked out those books from the Woodlawn Elementary School library as much as I did. So when I heard that the Nashville Ballet was going to be dancing the story, I was super excited.

Being broke, I had Ben get tickets as an early birthday gift. The opening ballet was “The Four Temperaments”, a 1940s Balanchine ballet that I had never seen before. It was amazing. Even Ben thoroughly enjoyed it and he’s usually not much for ballets that are “all about the dance”.

There was a brief intermission before the start of the Bell Witch. We were given 3D glasses which was humorous to me, since aren’t all live ballets in 3D already? We found out that the ballet was commissioned in 2003 with the Nashville Ballet and Nashville Chamber Orchestra working collaboratively. The Nashville Symphony was performing the music now in 2008.

I would love to tell you that the ballet was a deliciously spooky tale to start the Halloween week off with, but, unfortunately, it was written more for humor, which I was a little disappointed in. The music was wonderful and the dancers were brilliant, but the thing that irked me the most was the 3D effects. There was a screen behind the stage that would occasionally show something. A skeleton hand holding 3D glasses would urge you to hold yours up. Then it was usually something incredibly cheesy like a skull getting bigger. Or the moon turning into a skull. Or a skull appearing beside a gravestone. You get the point. I could have done without all of it. It really took away from the dancing, in my opinion. I like to lose myself in the dance, and having to stop and look at some cheesy 3D skull every so often didn’t really let me do that.

But, as I said, the dancers were great and we both really enjoyed the music. I just would have liked to seen more spooky stuff and less cheesy humorous stuff.

I know I never write here anymore.

Most of what I do right now revolves around the wedding, so while the wedding blog is busy, this one is suffering.

I hope everyone had a good Valentine’s day. Ben and I are both kind of broke, so we just got each other cards. Ben also cooked me a romantic candlelight dinner that was ready when I got home from work on Thursday. We were going to watch “The Notebook” but it didn’t get here on the day that Blockbuster said it would, so we ended up watching “Aladdin” instead, lol.

Friday night we went to the ballet. We had front and center seats, which was really cool. The Nashville Ballet performed four pieces. The first one, “Octet”, was choreographed by Twyla Tharpe. It was a pretty good modern ballet with four women and four men in nondescript black costumes. Some of the timing was a bit off; it looked like they hadn’t rehearsed it quite as much as the other pieces that were performed.

The second was “Trois Gnossiennes”. First and foremost, the music to this piece was lovely. It was done solely on piano, with the pianist playing at the back of the stage. The ballet consisted of three parts. In the first part, two men and a woman danced in front of a red background. In the second, a man danced in silhoutte against a blue background. This was my favorite part of the entire night, I believe. And in the third, the same woman from the first part danced solo. Her hair was down, which I commented to Ben that I love because it seems to denote despair, since ballet is always so rigid. The entire piece was absolutely beautiful and moving.

The third was based on the legend of Orpheus, though the name of the actual piece escapes me at the moment. It was choreographed by the artistic director of the Nashville Ballet (he also did the Lizzy Borden ballet I saw last year). I really liked the beginning of it, but I thought the ending of it was a little weak, although I’m not entirely certain why.

The final piece was “Rite of Spring”. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. It was very primal and a lot different than most ballets that you see.

Afterwards we were going to go by the Melting Pot for cheese and chocolate fondue, but they were only doing their Valentine’s package for $148. Since that was nearly $120 more than I wanted to spend, we went back to the house and ordered pizza instead.

Ben and I went to see “The Sleeping Beauty” performed by the Atlanta Ballet yesterday.

I’d never seen the whole thing (just bits and pieces, mostly of the Rose Adagio), and I’d been wanting to for years. So we made the 3.5 hour trek down to Atlanta and back yesterday for that purpose.

The ballet was absolutely enthralling. The Rose Adagio was wonderfully executed. Carabosse was the best and most beautiful evil fairy I’ve ever seen, and the pas de deux between Aurora and the Prince in Act III blew my mind. I was lost in the music and the dance nearly the entire time. It seemed at times the dancers were actually creating the music with their dancing, instead of it being pre-recorded. I had to stop myself from giving Aurora and Prince Desiré a standing ovation in the middle of the third act. The sheer beauty of it brought tears to my eyes.

Okay, on a new host now!

There should be no problems with Trojans. Basically, my previous host refused to acknowledge any problem because it did not happen to them, even though I was providing insurmountable proof that it was, in fact, occurring. I had malicious javascript, links, etc. mostly provided by my brother (who must be very bored) and they still refused to accept it. I had been emailing back and forth with them for about a week with no response other than them repeating, “We didn’t face any error.” In my last email, I said that if they did not attempt to fix the problem, I would have to change hosts because I couldn’t keep subjecting my visitors to a Trojan and they responded back with the same, “We didn’t face any error.” So I changed hosts. Less stressful to upload my entire website than to have to deal with incompetent tech support.

So, as far as I can tell, the only thing wrong with the site right now is that recent pictures in my blog aren’t showing up, and that’s because while I was uploading the entire site, I took the opportunity to rearrange and make my files a little more organized. Unfortunately, that does mean I have to go in and change some links in some places.

In other news…I have decided to start taking ballet classes. I decided this last week, when I was looking up some information on the ballet my mom and I were going to see at TPAC this past weekend (more on that in a minute). I was on the Nashville Ballet website and accidentally clicked on the School link. Then something about Adult classes caught my eye. I used to take ballet when I was really young, about 4 or 5, but my mom says I would rather watch cartoons on Saturday mornings than go to class, so I ultimately stopped going. However, I’ve always had a love for ballet, so I decided this would be a good way to help me stay in shape (or..get in shape), help out with my balance (I’m a complete klutz), and other beneficial things. So, I will be taking classes Thursday nights for the next six weeks. If I like it enough, I may increase this to two classes a week in January, but we will see. My first class is tomorrow.

The ballet we went to go see was new, choreographed by the artisitic director of the Nashville Ballet. It was based on the legend of Lizzie Borden, and gave his interpretation of how the story went. In our programs, we were given a ballet to vote if we thought she was guilty or not guilty and this entered us into a drawing for dinner for 2 and tickets to see “The Nutcracker.” I haven’t heard anything from them, so I assume I did not win. “Lizzie” was preceded by three other, shorter ballets: “Tribute,” “Serenade,” and “Journey.” Of those three, I liked “Serenade” the best. While watching it, I thought it was a little hard to follow, but I could tell it was about love and that there seemed to be a love triangle between the two principal ballerinas and the lead male dancer. It was very beautiful though, and I liked the flowing, long blue tutus. When I got home, I looked up what it was about, and learned that it didn’t actually tell a story, but it was about love and yearning. So I guess I interpreted it as well as one could have. “Lizzie” was also good, but in a different way. None of it was done en pointe (which kind of lowers its coolness value a little to me, hehe) but the story and dramatics were very well done.