rinnah's consumer views|a straight talking, tell-it-as-it-is consumer lifestyle blog

I have always loved dance, and of all the dance genres, ballet was my first love from the days when my mother sent me for baby ballet classes at the tender age of 3. So when I heard that Ballet Revolucion was in town, I jumped at the opportunity to make it the first live performance event on my list for 2012.

Ballet Revolucion definitely is not your normal ballet performance show. It’s been described online as “Ballet with attitude” and “Ballet unleashed as only the Cubans know how”. Check out the video below :

A chance group deal helped me to get awesome seats at almost half price; we were in the stalls just 2 rows from the stage and right in the center too, which meant that we had a perfect view of the action on stage.

I have to say that I was blown away by the energy of the dancers throughout the 2 hour show – as professionals it was the same from the start to the end, no flagging and there’s really nothing like a live performance to really get you going and totally immersed in whatever is happening on the stage. The touch of having a live band for the music was excellent as well as they kept the beat going.

But as much as I wanted to love Ballet Revolucion, I couldn’t.

I couldn’t help but get distracted by all the niggling, little technicalities that I could see. I wasn’t drawn into the dancer’s world where I was completely swept up in their reality until all the technicalities would fade into the distance and away from my memory. Instead, it was the little, unfinished things that kept pricking my consciousness and detracted from my enjoyment of the show.

Now here’s where I have to nitpick and give my (more than) 2 cents worth. (Feel free to skip this bit if you’re not a dancer.)

For a show with ballet in the title, I would have expected more/better ballet performances. I do understand that the show was created to make ballet more accessible to the general public and probably the general public would have enjoyed the short snippets of ballet interspersed with the rest of the dance styles. (The audience that night certainly did.) But for me, the ballet performances that I saw could have been better. Some lines were lovely, some were not. Sometimes extensions were not finished. One ballerina had a poker face, the other had a smile permanently plastered on. I didn’t feel that they were actually feeling the emotions or the expressions of the song and the choreography. The moves just didn’t feel effortless as ballet is supposed to be. It all felt rather contrived at some point or another.

Another area that was really glaring to me was the partner work. I’m not sure how much/often the dancers in the troupe work closely together in partner work, but the chemistry I expect to see in partner work just wasn’t there sometimes. It was just two people going through the motions of dance. I’m not sure if anyone else in the audience caught it, but I kept on seeing the quick glances and checks in between moves to ensure that the other dancer was where he/she was supposed to be. That really distracts me from the flow of the whole performance. I personally felt that the quick and multiple changes of dancers in this case detracted from what could have been lovely partner work.

I enjoyed the soloists’ work when it was shown but the group choreography left me wanting a bit more after a while. I saw a lot of repeated moves, just in different formations and by different dancers to different songs. Aside from one or two stand-outs, the troupe’s ballet background really showed in the group choreography. Some moves for hip hop were not loose enough, or ‘down and dirty’ enough. The flowing movement was sometimes there for contemporary pieces but that fixed ballerina poise still showed.

For the love of dance, yes you can be a Jack of all trades and dance many genres. But if I’m to watch a performance, I would rather watch one short piece by a master of his/her art that leaves me wanting more rather than a mishmash of a lot of styles that left me feeling as if something was missing. In a nutshell, I prefer quality over quantity.

You know, there’s only so many dance movies that have already been made about ballet/other genre crossovers that this production just feels like the live version of it.

Read other reviews on the Internet here :
The Sydney Morning Herald
The West Australian