Ballet at the Opera

 

The opera house here is a beautiful Belle Epoque building just across from the beach. I don't know if I've shown you pictures of it, though I've certainly taken some. Just... I've now been here so long and taken so many pictures that I don't know where most of them are anymore! So you'll just have to take it from me that it's a super pretty building. Once when we were on the beach in front of the opera we heard someone practicing their opera singing out one of its windows! It was great.

We have tickets in a month or two to see La Traviata there. But tonight we also had tickets for a dance from their ballet company, featuring music from Arvo Part and Philip Glass. The music was fantastic, with a great little orchestra in there. Maybe that bodes well for the opera? The dance was... not great, though the Philip Glass piece was way better, more fluid and danceable, and showed the quality of the dancers more clearly, or... at all. The choreography was tres mundane, seriously lacking in creativity. But I really like watching dance anyway, so it was an awfully good time.

The theater was beautiful in places, like, gorgeous, especially the intermission rooms, which were magical and glowing like a sunset, with ceiling paintings of putis from the early 1900's. Other things were full of peeling paint, worn carvings, and faded velvets. The design of the theater was ridiculous. We had a box along the side that fully faced at a right angle to the stage. Luckily it was all ours, and by the second act we worked out how to sit in it, which might have contributed too to our warmer feelings towards that second act!

I didn't get pictures of the beautiful intermission rooms, but I did get some of the main theater and present some of them here without embellishment. I can't promise I won't embellish or even make a painting of something here in the future. But for today I present these as part a more conventional post:

Here are the boxes, all facing each other across the theater floor, and not the stage:

This shows the back of the theater:

The huge and rather lovely chandelier close up, that you can glimpse in other pictures:

This is the mirror of our private box. By the second act we had fully redesigned it to our specifications:

The orchestra pit and stage before showtime:

The carvings of the dividers between the boxes:

Part of that chandelier again, with it's ceiling mural:

The only picture I have showing how worn the place was in parts. It was the drab areas and halls that were far worse than this, which is above the stage: