Ballet That Order

Another open-air free cultural shindig of the type that Brisbane does quite well, aided and abetted by lovely evening weather on the one hand and a misplaced sense of parental confidence on the other; this time a performance by the Australian Ballet, no less, of a ballet called Giselle.

The only experience I have of Giselle is that of the dancing teacher of Lettice, the rabbit, who gets married and invites the rabbit to be her flower girl, rather inexplicably. Lettice the rabbit helps the ring bearer out when he sneezes or something and drops the ring at the crucial moment, leading to something of a crisis for Giselle the bride, but all turns out well in the end.

Giselle the ballet is a rather more trivial affair. If I hadn't had the programme to explain the details to me I would have sworn that the story went along the lines of: there was this girl Giselle who liked to dress up as a ballet dancer and dance around, a lot, with various different fellows with Teutonically Titanic Tights who certainly weren't wary of waving their wares and had glutei which were certainly maximal. Eloise, when they did their high kicks (there's probably a word for that), quite figuratively boggled her eyes at their underparts. So anyway this Giselle dances around with all these athletic gentlemen before inexplicably dying and then spends the second half flitting around in some sort of nether-world (bursting I'm sure with nether-parts) with a bunch of ladies called the Willies.

Does that make any sense at all?

I did have the programme, though, and it seems that it's a tale of love and betrayal and anxiety-induced over-excitement. Poor Giselle with her weak heart, having to haunt all these people. I lost interest, frankly, in the story, though Eloise, when she wasn't boggling at the contents of the mens' trews was boggling at the dancing and setting off many a polite ripple of applause as she appreciated the skill and athleticism of the dancers. At least she wasn't applauded their underwear. She said.

Lyra, while all this cultural merriment was going on, had removed herself from the picnic blanketed audience area, and with Nicole in tow was dancing around with whoever would dance with her.

Before the performance had started, as dusk was settling over the Riverstage (it's a stage near the river, so another wonderful piece of original naming there), Lyra had created utter chaos by frog marching herself and a little friend she had, well, only just met, off into the sunset; through a crowd which was, like a metaphorical sausage skin, permeable to small objects, but not large ones. Muggins was in pursuit and within a few moments she had disappeared, leading to one of those "Good grief" moments where you cast your eyes around the thousands and thousands of people lying around on the grassy hillside, looking for that one flash of flashy shoes that gives away the location of your supposed charge, before sighing and just hoping she'll turn up again, even though the rest of the family is a hundred metres, OK twenty metres in the other direction.

Anyway there was a big fenced-off area where they were videoing the official video from, so guess where she was. Sigh.

Oh, and I suppose of passing interest is the fact that she had also earlier been apprehended by security after an attempted stage invasion. You can't keep a good girl down. As they say.