Tag Archives: ballet

What ballet taught me about comics

Luck has landed in my life someone kind and cultured (and gorgeous) who takes me to the theatre. Now, for a gal like me who grew up convinced that Ghostbusters was the zenith of Western cultural expression, this is kind of a big shift. Opera and ballet were always closed books to me–and, honestly, they looked like the kind of leather-bound, gilt-edged books that you overlook on a shelf, because they’re fusty, dated, and probably a bit cringe-inducing were you really to get to grips with them.

I’d love to say that one night in the stalls and my outlook opened up like a telescope, but my philistinism goes deeper than that. Riding the train back from Madame Butterfly, the song I couldn’t get out of my head was “Teenage Dirtbag”. At Carmen I got pretty excited because the production featured a real live horse walking on stage. And this weekend, when I saw my first ballet – Manon – my gauche little mind went “Ooh! You know what? This is just like comics!”

Stone cold badass in the making

Actually, it’s like comics in a lot of ways. Continue reading