More performances...

So I had another grand weekend of performances.

Friday, I attended a dance performance interpretation of Bernard-Marie Koltès' play Roberto Zucco. The story behind this is kind of cool, as one of the professors organizing one of my seminar (the same one on immigration and spectacle...and the same guy who was responsible for getting me to see the burqa ballet) is also a professional dancer. Besides being a sociologist. So anyway, he was in the show and invited us to come. It was out in St. Ouen, so Kari, Niamh, Emily and I headed out there (just north of Paris, literally just on the other side of the peripherique beltway). St. Ouen is a pretty cute town and it was a gorgeous performance space. Complete with cheap wine that we were allowed to bring INTO the theater, so what more could you ask for? haha.

Plus Koltès is one of my favorite French playwrights. He's probably #2 on my list, after Mouawad. So needless to say, I was excited. I even went out and bought Roberto Zucco, since it was one of the few Koltès plays I hadn't read (figures, I've read a pile of them, and they'd pick one of the few I don't know, haha). Anyway, now I have a bit of a problem: I'm going to be seeing this prof at our seminar, and I have no clue what to say. I didn't really get the performance, haha.

From what I could tell, it was sort of each dancer's impressions of the play, like each person chose a scene to explore in more detail. The dancing seemed fine to me (I know almost NOTHING about dance though), and I liked the music. But yeah...otherwise...hmmmmm.

So that was Friday. As I was coming home I was thinking to myself that I didn't have plans for Saturday night and I needed to get on that, and what do you know, I got home to find an email in my inbox from a member of my orchestra, who had a spare ticket to the opera on Saturday night. Perfect. So I wrote back to see if the ticket was still available, and I got lucky :-) So I immediately set out googling Billy Budd to find out what I needed to know for the performance. Since the original story was written by a dead white guy, I obviously knew nothing about it, haha.

It was at the Opera Bastille (the fairly ugly building that is actually quite impressive on the inside), and even though I've been all around the rehearsal space, I had never been to the actual hall. And MAN is it impressive...seats just over 2,700 people! Yeah, THAT is how big it is.

Even better, this woman from my orchestra WORKS at the opera bastille, so she had sweet tickets, for only 27 euros apiece. We were in the orchestra section, literally in the 6th row. Yes! Makes an opera so much cooler when you can actually see the acting going on at the same time, without any need for binoculars. Word.

During the intermission, she even took us back stage. This was awesome on two accounts: we got to use the bathroom for important people (and skipped all the lines, haha), and also because we got to go on stage and see all the equipment. Which was super awesome because the stage was amazing--it was done with these hydraulic pumps of some sort, so the floor would lift up and down to change scenes between above deck and below deck! Needless to say, the staging was so captivating (and my view of it was so good) that I found myself forgetting to pay as close attention to the music because wow, the spectacle of the whole thing was genius. The whole thing was in fact awesome, I've always liked Britten, and he did a great job on this opera (and E.M. Forster wrote the libretto, according to wikipedia, hahaha).

So yeah, there we have it. I've always wanted to hit an opera in Paris, and sure enough I managed to score and go with someone who works for the opera and thus gave us the royal treatment. Score!