a night at the ballet

On Friday night, to celebrate Children’s Book Week, I headed off to see the Atlanta Ballet perform a literary-inspired work, Don Quixote. Well, it wasn’t only to celebrate Children’s Book Week; I’d had the tickets for weeks. But it felt like an apt way to observe the event, because there were a lot of children there, and it was literary inspired.

Though the ballet is called Don Quixote, the man himself plays a very minor role; while he does make a half-hearted dash at a windmill, he mostly sits on the sidelines and watches other people dance. My theory on this is that if he did dance, people would get all the songs from the musical “Man of La Mancha” stuck in their heads. Cause I for one know that I was subconsciously listening for songs from that fine film when the orchestra started playing.

So, Don Quixote doesn’t dance. He leaves that to the young whippersnappers Kitri and Basilio, who are madly in love and must express this emotion through DANCING. So dance they do, all through three acts. But sometimes their dancing is foiled by Gamache, described in my program as a wealthy fop, who, from my seat, somewhat resembled Austin Scarlett from Project Runway Season 1. Gamache is good comic relief, as was Sancho Panza, as were the little girls who were seated three rows in front of us who were clearly enjoying a night in their fancy dresses. There was one girl, wearing this green sparkly dress, and I wondered of her, if this is what she wears to the ballet when she’s 12, what will she wear to the prom when she’s 17? But I digress.

In the first act of this ballet, all the dancing takes place in a marketplace, which is a convenient setting because there’s lots of reasons why lots of people would wander through a marketplace and suddenly feel compelled to DANCE. In this act, I was somewhat uncomfortable watching the dancers who went up on their toes, and I kept thinking, “NO! You’ll ruin your feet, pretty girl! Please stop dancing like that!” but by the end of the ballet, I was more like, “Get up on your toes and dance for me, dancing monkey!”

After the marketplace, action moved to a gypsy camp, where Kitri and Basilio get the blessing of some gypsies who read their palms to get married, and they head off-stage to do some private dancing, one imagines. Don Quixote makes a feeble stab at a windmill which so immediately exhausts him that he must fall to sleep at once and have a beautiful dream of dryads and little cupids dancing.

When he wakes up, it’s time to go to the tavern where Kitri and Basilio manage to get rid of that Gamache through ingenious means and then they get married. Marriage is symbolized in ballet by a lot of beautiful dancing, to the point that I made a mental note that I must get ballerinas for my wedding. It would be ideal if I could get the girl who played Kitri cause she was amazing. Seriously, it was an immensely beautiful scene and if all the little children who were at the performance didn’t leave with a burning desire to read Don Quixote at once, then they at least left with the unrealistic dream that they should become ballerinas. Or maybe that was just me.

Well, while I haven’t seen a ton of ballets in my day, I must say that this was definitely the best one I’ve ever seen. The costumes were beautiful, the sets were amazing, the music was fantastic and all the tiny little dancers gave it their all. In the case of Basilio, I say that quite literally cause he was wearing nude tights at one point and you could definitely see everything.