I just came home after watching the best ballet performance I have ever seen. I confess I was never a fan of ballet. I had the chance to see some spectacles before, however somehow, I was not as moved as I was whenever going to the opera for example, so I took a break from ballet for a while.
I saw the advertisement for the “Sunt o babă comunistă” show when one of my friends convinced me to accompany her at a tribute to Tchaikovsky performance and it caught my attention. When I saw that the Ballet Theatre announced their closing of the season with this show I purchased two tickets without delay.
I confess that I have been curious. I only knew about the novel with the same name (written by Dan Lungu, published in 2007) and about the movie “I’m an Old Communist Hag”, but I did not read the novel nor watched the movie so I did not know exactly what to expect or how to convince my boyfriend to accompany me. Luckily, the title has been enough and he was curious too.
The décor was amazing, it recreated perfectly the living room of an average family in those times’ Romania. I kind of thought it was my own living room from when I was a child and it directly sent me back into my memories, the old black and white TV, the white doily carefully set on top and the unforgettable fish trinket made of glass.
The music! Chosen with great care, it has been the reason for my continuous goosebumps during the entire show. The so-called “șlagăre” (oldies) that we used to listen to on the radio on a daily basis reminded me of lyrics that I thought I had forgotten.
The topic is both raising awareness of a commonly met situation AND teaching us a lesson. Most of the families nowadays have two components, the parents that lived during the communist period and the children raised in a post-communist atmosphere. And the two topics that are always present at the family dinners are: 1. “what was it like living during communism” and 2. “the nostalgist’s viewpoint who has the tendency of forgetting what was wrong and promoting only the good parts” but I won’t spoil the end.
Finally, I would recommend this performance to everyone, regardless if you are a ballet lover or not, or if you read the novel and liked it. If you’ve never been to a ballet performance, this is a great opportunity to get in touch with this art and try to understand it.
Congratulations to Sibiu Ballet Theatre and to Aleisha Gardner who choreographed this dance theatre performance and to the entire crew.
