Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Friday night, I attended a mixed program at the National Ballet. Thanks to a promotion, I was able to sit in the 2nd row at orchestra level. However, with the pit and the front of stage, it wasn't as close as I was expecting. There was also gigantic heads that block your view. I think the elevated seats along the side are probably better.

The first piece was a remount of Aszure Barton's Watch Her. Perhaps a commentary on the male gaze, it started with a man peeking through the window of a featureless wall. The partition is pulled up to reveal a collection of women, somewhat primly dressed, moving in unison. Throughout the next 40 min, they would dance in groups, pairs, and singly, always followed by men in business suits. The women seem to hold the power though, as they often admonished the men with tapping toes or a silencing finger pressed to their lips. 3 dancers showed different sides of relationships: the cold and imperious Sonia Rodriguez, the tender Svetlana Lunkina, and the playful Jenna Savella. The nearness to the stage actually made some of the group choreography harder to appreciate.

The second piece was Frederick Ashton's A Month In The Country mounted in 1976. If I've learned anything from the play A Misfortune, then an older Russian husband with a much younger wife is always recipe for disaster. So here we had Yslaev (Hazaros Surmeyan) oblivious to the adoration that Rakitin (Patrick Lavoie) lavished upon Natalia Petrovna (Greta Hodgkinson). Yet although she basked in the attention, it was actually her son's tutor, the charming Beliaev (Guillaume Côté), that caught her eye. Her feelings were revealed after she jealously slapped her naive ward, Vera (Jillian Vanstone), for pushing herself at Beliaev. Once Vera found out about the clandestine dalliance, things escalated. I enjoyed the traditional but naturalistic choreography. Often classical narrative ballet has formal tableaus (a sequence repeated interminably, dancers sitting around watching solo after solo) that seemed not just artificial and hermetic but stultifyingly long.