Ballet Date Night

Well, we went on a date to the ballet Saturday night. Oregon Ballet Theater’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, to be exact. Actually, there were two pieces in the program. I’ll start with the other piece.

First was an interpretation of the Four Humors. You know them from your Shakespeare:  Choleric, Melancholy, Phlegmatic, Sanguine.

See, I hadn’t read the program yet when the curtain came up for the first program. I just watched, completely unaware of the intent of the piece. I was most captivated by the dance and choreography in the first vignette. The other three vignettes were delightful, but I connected most deeply to the first.

During intermission, while we stretched our legs in the lobby, C asked me my thoughts on the first piece. I shared my preference for the initial vignette. That’s when C brought out her program and we looked at the notes. Only then did I realize the ‘Four Humors’ thing.

Care to guess which humor was first? Melancholy. Yep!
To know me is to love me.

Midsummer Night’s Dream was a narrative style ballet. Know how Nutcracker tells a story with dance interspersed with miming? Same here. The dancers act. The actors danced. Set changes move the story along. It takes about 40 minutes I guess for Midsummer Night’s Dream, in one single act.

The dance was wonderful. The principal dancers were amazing. About 14 or so dancers are children from SOBT. C whispered in my ear that they’re all Level 2 students. My lovely daughter? She’s Level 1. 

It was a great show. On that particular evening, I cannot say that the ballet touched my heart, but I could admire the effort and the skill involved. Whether the ballet touched my heart, I think, had more to do with my emotional condition as an audience member than it did with the magic of the dance or the efforts of the dancers. They did amazing work; I got out of it only as much as I was able to receive that evening. And that’s okay.

C and I had a date, though. That was a victory right there. I have to admit that our family life is wound so tightly that time alone is hard to come by. We almost didn’t know how to treat each other, out together, alone, without an entourage to herd. It was a working session for us. We had a date, but we also constructively and respectfully discussed some relationship dynamics throughout the family that have blocked our own relationship. It was a hard talk to have, but we did it. It wasn’t a fight, or an argument; more like a very serious Bahai consultation ongoing between events of the evening.  And, in the process, by the end of the evening, we  relocated our common ground.