My First Ballet
I believe in experiencing everything once, apart from potholing, canoeing, murder and seeing Bruce Springsteen. So I went to my first ballet last night at the Royal Albert Hall: Swan Lake performed by the English National Ballet in the Round. Clearly I have nothing to compare it to, as I've only seen ballet in films that have a scene at the ballet, but it was pretty amazing. I feel the same way I felt after visiting Wimbledon for the first time last year and seeing my first live tennis match. Now, some of you will know all about ballet, so bear with me and my initial thoughts:

The men have incredibly shapely bottoms, which are in unforgiving tights and thus on proud display at all times. You could crack walnuts with these bottoms, which is presumably why there is a famous ballet just about that. The women are almost anorexically thin, except I suspect they haven't got any disorders at all, as they are strong as lady oxen, and walk about most of the time on their tiptoes, which must take superhuman strength. Just as I love going to see stage musicals to admire the dancing, with a ballet there is hardly anything else to admire - just the dancing. And it is a sight to behold. In the round, which is now 100 per cent of my ballet experiences, you get a lot more dancers for your money. There were 69 on stage at one point, and in the Lakeside scenes, there were 60 swan-maidens. Captivating. I would imagine you only get about 20 on a normal theatre stage. When you've seen Swan Lake in the round, it's difficult to imagine seeing it any other way, so fully do the dancers (mostly Russian, Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian, with a few token Brits) use the space.

I loved the sound of it. And not just the beautiful music of the Orchestra Of The English National Ballet (amazing how many of the hits I knew, but didn't know I knew, if you see what I mean) - I loved the sound of the feet on the floor. You never hear this in films. It's so percussive when the swan-maidens tiptoe around en masse. The audience clapped at the end of each individual dance, but by the time of Act III, which takes place at the Great Hall of the Castle, a formal celebration that involves "impressive displays of national dances" (mainly East European, I surmised), the applause got more spirited. I even heard a man shout, "Bravo!" and another man shout, "More!" (which was nice, but pointless, as I imagine the dancers have to stop when the bit is finished, and can't just keep dancing). Come the climax, back at the Lake, the Albert Hall was tumultuous with appreciation, which was great in the sweaty circumstances. (No air con in there.) My favourite part was when they first created the Lake, by filling the round with dry ice and then lighting it in such a way that it looked like a mystical body of water, which was disturbed by Rothbart, the evil "half-man, half-bird", running around. Fantastic. You'd think this stuff was invented by Stadium Rock (1965-1993). It wasn't.

So, all in all, a tremendous experience. (We even got found a parking meter, and didn't have to use the car park.) The ballet lasted almost three hours, with two intervals. To be frank, there's not enough story to merit that running time, and a lot of the dancing is repetitive (mainly tiptoeing and leaping in the air and holding people up in the air), but the overall spectacle puts such quibbles in the shade.

If you are silly enough to think that ballet audiences are a cut above, I saw at least two audience members with their phones on, and one woman was actually texting while Odette returned to her companions and Siegfried came to beg her forgiveness. Idiot.