Helen Adourian, July 2022
The Masquerade ballet, written by Aram Khachaturian, is about a man, who was just playing a card game, and he won. Later, the man gets invited to a ball, in which his wife loses her bracelet. After he finds out that she lost her bracelet, he gets so mad that he poisons her, which leads to her death. Afterwards, his “Friend” tells him that another woman stole it from her. The husband slowly goes insane.
I thought that the plot was typical for a ballet. The music was impressive. However, the dancing was unsatisfactory. At one point, when the man was carrying the woman offstage, they bumped into a wall. The audience was trying not to laugh, and while they were holding it in, I was not…
Something that I did like was how the lights expressed the feelings of people. This made it easy to understand what they were feeling, and it made the audience understand why they were feeling this way.However the lights were also very dim and I could barely see the dancers.
While I am not a fashion expert, I didn’t know that the dresses were too long for ballet dancers! The reason this is was because one of the dancers almost tripped on her skirt!
At the end when the wife was dying, it took her about an hour to die. This got me impatient. This sounds wrong but I just wanted her to die already!!! I find it unbelievable that she was dancing while being poisoned. I think that she should say something and then die.
However, having the information about Khachaturian, I think that because he was born in 1903 he had experienced some tough things, to make his life even harder. He died in 1978, but at least he died happy, and everyone was happy enough to come to his funeral so that is a big improvement.
Overall, I do NOTTTT recommend this ballet over Carmen. Farewell for now!
—Helen:)