"Seasons" ballet

 

You would think everyone would have been all balleted out after "Giselle," but the girls' studio did another show too because none of the youngest classes got to have parts in Giselle! This one was more of a recital format (loosely held together with the theme of "Seasons") and it was fun because the older girls could choose more of what they wanted to do, and Daisy got to do a "Senior Solo" since she is graduating this year! She danced a solo from "La Corsaire" and wore this beautiful costume. It was bittersweet to see her dancing her (probably) last solo! When we tried out ballet classes just for fun during the Pandemic, I never knew she would become such an accomplished dancer in just a few short years. This is a part of her life she'll be sad to leave behind!

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Intentions, Murderous and Otherwise

Have you seen Giselle? It's one of those ballets one always hears of, but I had never seen it before the girls' ballet studio put it on this year. The story is a bit horrifying, I must say! Giselle is betrayed in love, dies of a broken heart, and then after her death, she (for some reason??!) saves her faithless lover, barely, from being danced to death by the ghostly wilis in the forest! And whom do you suppose were two of those vengeful wilis? Daisy and Junie, that's who. Tsk tsk!

Even though I didn't think I'd seen Giselle or the wilis before, I was somehow familiar with their signature step, this strange flattened arabesque that the wilis do while hopping across the stage (arabesque chugs, they call them). You will perhaps be shocked to hear that this move "signifies their murderous intentions"! Yes! They are quite evil! Not a role I can condone at all.

But let us leave this ghastly scene and go back to earlier in the ballet.

Thank goodness Goldie remains sweet and innocent. A charming village lass. (I suppose Daisy is one too. But not for long!)

Here is one of their pretty peasant dances

Junie had a part in the pas de trois and also a long solo!

j

Watch her, if you'd like! She is so good! (link: https://youtu.be/RNuIESzD2Rs)

https://youtu.be/XEB5g-Aces8

I like this picture of Junie and Brynn just standing casually in midair

Such high leaps!

In the last few performances, someone (another mother, I'm afraid😬) has been VERY ZEALOUS about the costumes—excessively zealous, we might say—not wanting the dancers to so much as set FOOT in the lobby while wearing them, and since they also didn't have any dress rehearsals to speak of (they had them, but no one dressed for them)—it was very difficult getting pictures of Daisy and Junie in costume. We had to sneak out the back door like thieves in the night! (DO thieves in the night sneak out the back door? They probably have to sneak IN the back door first, but then surely they must then sneak back out again?) But I'm glad we did it because their costumes were very pretty and they wanted a record of them!

The wilis do this low, cradling-arm pose a lot too, and we read somewhere that it might represent the babies they will never have.😢

It doesn't excuse their murderous intentions, though!

The Second Act of Giselle looks really spooky and cool. The backdrop is all black and the wilis, with the spotlights on them, really do look like glowing ghosts against it.

The girls have these long veils on at the beginning of the Act. They tied fishing line to the tops of the veils and then at a certain moment, people backstage pulled on the fishing line and all the veils just whisked off their heads and disappeared behind the curtains. It was really cool to watch!

(Like this)

Here is Clementine's depiction of one of the veiled dancers, drawn a couple weeks later

It was so dark, and their dresses were so white, I had a hard time even taking pictures of them.

https://youtu.be/4YCa0g0eecM

Here are those murderously flat arabesques. They're so interesting to watch. So distinctive. And the girls have to do it without crashing into the lines of other dancers going the opposite way!

https://youtu.be/6vLxL3mrrTw

Sometimes their murderous intentions are emphasized by a red light from below. Scary! And they do not smile. Never. It wouldn't be fitting for such murderous young ladies.

Poor Hilarion pleads with the queen of the wilis for his life. But she refuses. She is heartless. They're all heartless. (Except Giselle, of course. She manages to save her own [unfaithful!] lover, Albrecht, when he shows up later. But Hilarion has no such luck.)

The queen of the wilis dooms him to dance until he dies!

And then he is forced to do so, hemmed in on every side by the unrelenting wilis!

Very sad!

Clementine wore her tutu to the ballet and enjoyed it very much! I can only imagine what valuable life lessons she was learning from the story.

She was definitely paying attention, as evidenced by this dance she did for me me later the next day!

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Nutcracker 2025

Last year, as you may remember, we got home from Quebec just in time (literally…they raced in after intermission) for the girls to go watch their friends in the Nutcracker, but of course they didn't get to participate themselves. And Junie's teacher had told her Junie would have been Clara if we hadn't been in Quebec. So that was a little sad. But, now all the girls are beyond the "Clara" stage, they get to dance the harder Second Act roles…including, sometimes, with partners! And that has been very fun for them!

It was also weird this year because Nutcracker was after Christmas! The performance was at a new theater they haven't used before and somehow they couldn't get on the schedule early enough, or something. So it was weird to have rehearsals leading up to Christmas and then a break and then suddenly the performances on the 26th and 27th when we are usually getting to, finally, take a break from everything! I didn't like it. But I think it will be back to normal next year.

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Coppelia

The spring ballet this year was Coppelia, which I'd heard of but never seen. It's a weird story, to be honest. A mechanical doll (who gets mistaken for a real girl, and later switched with a real girl, of course) figures into it. The other characters are things like "villagers" and "harvesters" and "friends." My girls were…some of those things. (I realize I don't even know which. Villagers, perhaps?) They had pretty costumes and looked beautiful in their dances, several of which (I have it on good authority) were quite hard!

So, here are some pictures.

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Goldie-Alice in Wonderland and The Firebird

The girls' studio did two Spring Ballets this year, Alice in Wonderland and The Firebird. And guess who got to be Alice? Yes. It was our Goldie. She was perfect for the part!

She is not dancing en pointe yet, but she danced so wonderfully. It was a joy to watch her. I hadn't seen Alice before and didn't know anything about it! I still don't know, actually, if this version was taken wholesale from some other production or if they cobbled it together with their own music. It was a cool mix of genres—some Shostakovich, some Prokofiev, some Danny Elfman for the lyrical dances, some other modern stuff I didn't recognize. Really fun. My first time seeing any of it was at the dress rehearsal.

First some costume pictures. Daisy was the March Hare. Or the March Bunny, as we call her.

What a leap!

Here is Goldie-Alice.

Such a cute costume. She was thrilled because it was made just for her, and fit her perfectly!

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