J. and I wrestled with a ponderous, heavy revolving door at the front of the Royal Opera House; we were being treated to a special backstage tour there. It was with absolute glee that we walked round to the stage door entrance in a side street. This was, without question, a theatre -- there were the framed posters, of ballets and operas; there was a cast member from one of the ballets coming out to collect his mail from the desk there, leaning over it with a fluid movement and unconsciously elevating one leg as he did so; there was a woman in complete late Victorian costume, skirt swishing down at her feet and bonnet tied securely on her head, coming out to ask what the gentleman at the desk thought of her outfit and makeup. It was the excitement of going somewhere I'd never gone before, except, again, in a book.
We walked about that morning with our guide in the labyrinth of corridors that the Royal Opera House contains. In the darkened wings of the stage, so deep that it seemed endless in the darkness, we could follow the music director's movements on a black and white monitor as he conducted a dress rehearsal for 'Faust'. But the voice and the music seemed distant until we had stepped into a gallery of the auditorium itself, feeling our way round in the dark, unable to take our eyes off the stage. A man sang, and then a woman - I think his name was Robert Alagna and hers was Angela Georghiu - but all I can really say about it was that as their voices rose and fell in that empty theatre, they transformed it into a place where all that existed was what was on the stage, and not even the stage itself was real. There was a brief moment of silence after they had both finished, and then that stage world disappeared as everyone applauded.
The rest of our tour took us behind that world which is presented on stage. We stepped into the orchestra, looking up at the stage through the grating over half of the pit, sheet music left open on row after row of stands arranged in front of us, notes waiting in the yellow light to be translated into sound; then we even stood upon the wooden floorboards of the stage for a brief, thrilling moment, while the footlights shone out at us, the theatre behind filled with empty seats.
More corridors led to where the gargantuan sets are stored, in a room that seemed three stories high, at least, while we walked round those ingenious deceptions that fill the stage with the physical semblance of a different world. Higher up in the building, we peered into a room where the shoes of every member of the ballet company are stored, right from the prima ballerina to the most insignificant of dancers in the chorus. There, a woman painstakingly sewed a wig onto a canvas base, one strand of hair at a time, while another styled a wig for use. We saw the huge vats in which every costume is dyed to the desired shade and colour. The costumes and accessories were not even two feet away from our eyes, and suddenly, the measure of authenticity and careful work that must go into what is to be looked at from afar became apparent, along with the elements of artifice that allow for freedom in performance; A crown must gleam like metal without being heavy. Here exist costumes in the strict equality of playhouse storage -- ballet and opera together, hanging on racks.
Most breathtaking of all, we watched as two dancers practiced for the evening's show, scrutinized by a dance director, every angle, every strain and every tiny movement visible in the mirrors lining the room, under stark white light. Other dancers lay sprawled on the floor and couches, stretching tired muscles, at a height overlooking the London rooftops, under more glass and great windows to allow in air and natural light. The upper floors of the Opera House were in complete contrast with the lower floors; down there near the stage almost everything was plush, red, Victorian, dark, almost stifling -- up on the higher floors where people worked busily to fashion the assistance to performance, it was ironically as if they wanted to remove every bit of makeup and lighting and work in a world as bright and real and beautiful as the sunlight itself.
As we stepped out again into the street, up above us, the Bridge of Aspiration joined the Royal Ballet School to the Royal Opera House, from student to accomplished performer, in what can only be described as a square captured pirouetting in slow motion, every movement frozen in a glass curve. Across, on the pavement, a little girl stretched nervously in front of the door to the Royal Ballet School, waiting for an audition, ready to cross her own bridge.
We returned that evening to the ballet for a performance of 'Onegin'. And sitting in the darkened theatre, eyes fixed on the stage as the curtains lifted, everything we had seen that very morning seemed to suddenly make sense. The backdrops were now made up of thousands of little brush strokes. Every prop had been carried down from where it had been made, stored in the huge room we had seen. The drapes had been hemmed somewhere upstairs where the costumes had been stitched and dyed. As the two dancers we had watched that morning performed the same passionate scene we had watched them rehearse, I could hear their feet on the wooden floorboards of the stage, and the sound brought back the effort of their rehearsal, changed into pure grace and agility now, the effort perhaps not noticable at that distance and under the shadows of stage lighting. It was a perfect synthesis of endless labour from so many, concentrated in a dancer floating across the stage under a spotlight.
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