I’ve been too busy to blog about this all weekend, but I saw Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake at Sadler’s Wells on Saturday, primalrily because I quite liked Dorian Gray and Edward Scissorhands and Swan Lake is the dance world’s version of a big fucking deal.
I didn’t know the story of Swan Lake, but I did know that Bourne’s version is famous for replacing a load of prissy little anorexic woman with this wild gang of thuggy swan homeboys. Those guys wouldn’t think twice about breaking your arm.
The thing I wasn’t expecting though, was how funny it was. In the first half there’s a drag queen dancing at a club called Swank’s and the unveiling of a naked guy like a statue and a mobile phone ringing at an inappropriate moment and and old lady who thinks the Prince dude is trying to nick her trolley. Fucking loved it. I know I’m coming late to the party and everything (Bourne first staged Swan Lake in 1995) but this is how the dance world are going to keep their audiences in the future. The man’s a genius.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention that I’ve moved house and I work in a theatre in Leicester now.
It was my first proper not-an-induction shift at Curve tonight, and I was ushering for Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray.
Good things about the shift:
Dorian Gray is very very good. There’s an awful lot of homo-erotic nakedness and dead people hanging from a sort-of-cage-wall-thing and a picture of a man with exploded eyes.
I got to stand next to a couple who were talking in and brandish my torch like a weapon until they shut up. (They left in the interval. Mwahahahaha etc.)
You know when you start a new job and you say “everyone is so nice!” when really you mean “everyone is so nice apart from that twat over there”? Well, that twat obviously wasn’t working tonight because everyone was so nice!
Another usher girl asked if any of us had any tampons and I did so I used it to buy her friendship.
Bad things about the shift:
I had to stand up the whole time.
I went to get more little plastic ice cream scoops at the exact moment that a guy told the other usher on my door that Curve was a massive waste of public money and all the staff are shit. (I always miss good stuff.)
Primark should be banned from selling trousers made out of fucking bin bags.
