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Cinderella
Sadler's Wells
Using influences from mime and puppetry, and even what looks very much like the occasional trope from Chinese opera movement, along with exquisite observation of the way children move and react, and the beautiful ballet skills of his dancers - and still more: an immense reservoir of imagination - Maguy Marin has created an extraordinary piece of dance theatre. It combines enchantment and strange menace - under the romance of the tale as Marin tells it run very dark skeins, unsettling and surreal, hinting at cruelties and disappointments, at terrors and loneliness, of the kinds peculiar to childhood. But the charm not just of the story but of Marin's remarkable telling of it wins triumphantly, just as it should, driving away the shadows, and with them the ugliness and cruelty which blights.
Marin squarely faces the challenge of the Cinderella tale's saccharin possibilities, and defeats them hands down. For with the darkness implicit in the tale, and the stroke-of-genius use of masks to introduce poignancy, enchantment, beauty, and an amazing degree of expressiveness, Marin has searched into the corners of Prokofiev's powerful narrative score and found ways of giving the central emotions a remarkably exact symbolisation. There is much humour in the process, and each of the main characters is given a gestural motif to characterise him or her. Thus the matriarch settles her bosoms before taking any action, the Prince steps everywhere with infinite grace, the Fairy Godmother exercises her illuminated wand like a mechanical doll.
Cinderella herself is completely realised in character, from the way she wakes up in her kitchen corner at the beginning to the way she accepts the Prince's embraces at the end. Although this is a grown-up tale whose themes need no explanation from any Bruno Bettleheim, Marin has woven the richly-conceived Cinderella persona out of a child's mannerisms, a brilliant stroke because it simultaneously captures innocence and awakening, and makes it obvious that the glass slipper could fit no one but her.
The set is striking and fully integrated into the action, each element necessary for advancing or commenting on the tale. The use of toys and tricks characteristic of an Edwardian nursery is another of many contributory strokes of imaginative genius; they not only fit the story perfectly, but double the potency of its telling.
If the staging and choreography constitute work of the highest imaginative order, no praise can do justice to the brilliant realisation of Marin's intentions by his troupe. Lyon Opera Ballet is a collection of fine dancers, for whom the highest classical standards are taken as read, to which they add an admirable repertoire of skills in mime and acting. They combined to produce a wonderful evening of theatrical dance, and an object lesson in the limitless possibilities of ballet to entrance.
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