This weeks dose of culture

I’ve just got back from seeing First Drafts at the Opera House. My friend Vanessa is a ballerina with the Royal Ballet and she had choreographed a piece. First Drafts is an opportunity for members of the Royal Ballet to try out new works. The results can be very mixed. Vaness’s piece was last on the bill. It was called Sea Castles and was to a piece of music by Edward Elgar. I don’t know the title of the music but it sounded like a counter-tenor, I’ll ask her later. The set consisted of three white flats painted with huge pink bouquets. She had four male dancers wearing only black shorts. The movement seemed to reference Nijinsky at times, the two dimensional vase painting poses he used, but Vanessa is a genius at getting the dancers to push themselves and find new shapes, lifts and holds. It was at times very camp, with a repeated motif of the boys holding there hand to their foreheads in manner of a Victorian swoon, but there were also moments of machismo, at one point of of the boys throws himself across the stage into the arms of the other three boys and the audience let out a collective gasp. Until Vanessa’s piece the audience had been politely appreciative, but there whooped and cheered as the boys took their curtain call. I was very proud. She gets dinner and drinks next week!