Dance!

Had an evening out with some friends and we went to the ballet in Raleigh!  The performance was Cinderella and was just perfect.  The Carolina Ballet http://www.carolinaballet.com/  is a great company that has grown in the last dozen years or so.  The performance could have been cutesy and done, but instead was a fresh and beautiful version of this classic.  We had great seats - almost front and center.  It amazed me most of all how quiet these dancers were.  How all we heard was occasionally their feet coming back to land on the ground again.  They seemed to float on the air they were so graceful and free.  I can't even get through one yoga class without grunting so loud the instructor calls attention to it.  They perform these amazing feats of flexibility and pose without so much as a whisper.  In addition, the music was live and performed by the resident Pianist Tetyana Ryabchikova - he played for over an hour and it was flawless!

After the performance we got an extra.  A dark interpretation of one of my favorites - Barbers' Adagio for Strings.  Each note of this piece is so sharp in its sadness, so heavy with hopelessness that it was a struggle for me not to allow the tears to run down my cheeks.  Every time I hear this music I am moved by its beauty and melacholy.  The performance was the struggle of one woman among five men, as she moved from the arms of one to the other.  But the music, for me, filled the room with a thick swelling of suffering and blanketed me with such melancholy - it eclipsed what I was seeing. 

I think Adagio for Strings is the sound of a soul dying - it is so pure in its release of each note, it is not of this world.