They Applauded the Plastic Dummy

Last night Ms. FitN and I went to the Ballet, the advantage of living in the Great White North is that these events are reasonably priced – compared to London and New York.  Anyway, we have season tickets for the Montreal Ballet season (among many other cultural events).  Generally, I like the ballet, having lived as a student in London (London is cheapish when you are a student), a saw great productions, and an appreciative audience.

That was not the case last night.  Ms. FitN and I saw “La Sylphide”, one of the world’s oldest romantic ballets and not only was the performance wooden and out of synch with the music – considering it was canned music (as opposed to a live orchestra) it’s rather remarkable..

Now Montreal audiences in general believe that any performance is deserving of a standing ovation, in fact, I suspect that this is our compass to a good show, you would never have an audience in Montreal booing (as they have done in recent year at La Scala or Carnegie Hall).  “It was so good, they got a standing ovation”, justifying the amount of money spent to see a cultural event.

Last night was a new low, as the lights we lowered the public began applauding (sometime spectators applaud the conductor as he arrives when the music is live – it was canned here), then at the end of the Overture (which lasted a few minutes) people again applauded – again canned music.  So far no performance had occurred, Ms. FitN joked that it was a bit like passengers applauding the performance of the autopilot on a flight (note:  Montrealers are the only people in the world who applauded when a flight lands – don’t know if they are surprised that the whole thing didn’t end in disaster, ok so the Pope kissed the ground…).  Anyway, the ballet started, we both noted that the whole show felt flat, manly because the dancing and the music seemed incidental, the dancers out of tempo never allowed the music to get in the way of their performance.  The surprising thing here is that the Guangzhou ballet company that performed here has a rather good technical reputation.

From time to time there would be a dance solo, at the end of which the dancer would approach the front of the stage and bow for applauses – I’ve never seen that before, thankfully Montrealers applauded on cue (although at one point even they had enough).  It is one of the first times ever I have almost fallen asleep during a performance; I felt absolutely no connection to the show.  Finally, I don’t know who “wired” the stage but the sound quality was dismal.

The absolute low point of the evening were the applauses for the dummy;  The story is a little boring but bottom line a Scottish guy falls in love with a Sylph (forest elves), at one point the Sylph flies across the stage, but instead of using a real dancer they used a dummy (it crosses quickly and there are no movement), you guessed it Montrealers applauded that,

Yep, Montrealers applauded the dummy.