10:30 met Veronika and her workmate Elena outside the gallery. Went to see an awful ballet1 the recorded score of which was cobbled together from Mozart’s Greatest Hits. Awful dancing. Trite staging. I left at the interval.
In my memory, the staging involved the dancers emerging from a giant cosmic egg. Young-Toby was likely the only person in the audience to remember this —
Along with The Monkees, who seemed to have a lot of fun, zany, fast-talking, witty-ticcy Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy was a role model for younger young-Toby. He has become so again since young-Toby took Williams’ classes in Good Morning Vietnam as his basic teaching model. There is a decent amount of physical comedy, alongside the rote learning. Anything to get a response.
Once, when it thunders during Class B or C, young-Toby turns and genuflects to the framed photograph of Václav Havel hanging in the same place as that of the last-but-one Communist President Gustáv Husák. (Or perhaps it had been Karl Marx, looking iconically down on the schoolchildren.) The genuflection gets a nervous laugh.
Ballet, of course, can be great; modern ballet, of course, can be great, but it can also be a crime against humanity.
Imagine if there were a cosmic egg.
Imagine if the aesthetic truth of the universe was indeed captured once and for ever on a 1974 prog rock album cover.
Or in this 1990 ballet.