Went to the ballet last night, at the Royal Theatre, looking hopelessly underdressed in a sea of women in short skirts and shining materials, men in suits -- let's face it, I was wearing cargo pants and I'd just come from work. Beforehand, the Accomplice and I went to the little Japanese restaurant that used to be Hime, the name escapes me, and it was like bizarre parallel universe. I kept expecting to see Gloriee to come out of the kitchen with a beard. It wasn't bad, food delivered with an unnatural efficiency, but the negitoro roll was a bit bland.
The ballet was the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula, the same one Guy Maddin adapted to make Pages from a Virgin's Diary. It is pure coincidence that this happened to come to town just after I watched the film. Highly enjoyable, even from the bizarre angle we were sitting at, although the second half of the ballet proper was a bit weaker -- it lost a fair amount of plot progression and as a consequence, the choreography seemed to spin out, losing its focus in the process. The first half had to do with Lucy Westernra's seduction by the Count, and as the Accomplice pointed out the two dancers had a great deal more chemistry than the second half's Mina had with Dracula.
In between the halves was a pantomime wich compressed the novel's storyline until about six minutes which was quite fun (vampires brides chasing after baby carriages!) although some of the narration could have been rewritten to make it a bit stronger and funnier. After that was the Red Dance, which was supposedly an examination of Dracula's place and function in society's unconscious, taking the form of a furred wolf-man moving through forests of dancers in red. Scantily clad, highly athletic dancers in a variety of negligible red outfits, sex and death and pudding. The heat was rather palpable, although at one point two of the dancers broke out of character and said something to each other, possibly forgetting they were on stage.
The whole thing was flawed, certainly, by some weak adaptation choices - if you're going to lose plot elements for the sake of the art you still need to put something into it to keep the thing from becoming listless - but quite beautiful all around. The red dance boiled the blood and there was a beautiful mirror-dance sequence between Lucy and her fiancé as he gave her a transfusion on stage.