Sleeping Beauty

When I was a child, my favorite Disney movie was Sleeping Beauty. I saw it at the movies and was given the soundtrack as a gift at some point. To be truthful, I don’t remember seeing it at the movies but I do recall listening to the record quite a bit. It was enough that when I played the record again (yes, it did survive my childhood somehow) all the songs came back to me quite readily. And I’ve seen it on video a few times as an adult and it still felt very familiar.

A friend was fortunate to get some free tickets to see the dress rehearsal of the ballet of Sleeping Beauty and invited me to attend last night. Neither of us had ever been to a ballet. I have to admit I’ve never really had a burning desire to go to the ballet. But with free tickets, it was definitely worth having a look. We had a rather leisurely dinner at a restaurant in the same complex before going into the theater. The show started promptly with a few minutes of  music played by the local symphony orchestra before the curtain rose.

We’d been given a page with a synopsis of the performance to read beforehand but neglected to do this. I soon discovered I didn’t know the story quite as well as I had thought because I had trouble following what was going on.  I made sure to read the information for the second and third acts during the interval. To be honest, I didn’t care much for the ballet part of the performance. I found many of the movements very weird and uncomfortable to watch. The business of walking on toes for long periods seemed terribly unnatural and made my feet hurt to see it. Most of the women were way too skinny. Watching the men dance was preferable to the women because they weren’t so thin and their dancing didn’t have so many of the unnatural movement as the women. Despite lacking much interest in the ballet,  I really enjoyed the symphony orchestra and will consider going to the symphony should an appropriate opportunity arise.