What Karsavina Said

So, here we are off to perform in London for the last time as my character Madame Galina. The decision to stop was sudden. I'm no longer able to conjure the Prima Ballerina Assoluta behind the act, her character motivations or her sense of heritage. Wien I used to imagine her dancing she was a lot like Alla Sizova. Now I see me. I would have a jumble of thoughts during a performance. Rising from the grave Giselle is cold and is waxy in appearance. Nikya in the Shades act is a wisp like cigarette smoke seen in the beam from a cinema projector. The Swan Queen is virtually motionless when the feathers turn into skin because all her energy is being taken up with the transformation - as the temperature of ice changing to water is constant because all the energy from the heat source is going into the melting process. Fonteyn would only move her head so far then make a sudden eyes-right so the audience got a flash of the whites. Maximova insisted that even a step as technical as fouettes must be made personal to each role: the character's inner life should bring a different quality to them; you shouldn't look different just because you have either a rose behind your year or black feathers on your head. Karsavina said that the Firebird's lulling to sleep gesture is like the smoothing of your best linen table cloth. Now I have one thought: get on, get through the act, get off.
What Karsavina said leads me to what I'm needing to happen now: starting with having real linen full stop, classier gin than own-label, non-Pound Emporium fairy lights: I want to deal with the fact that I've had a lifestyle bypass. I'm fifty one. There has to be more.
Really.

Comments

Me Featuring in The Sunday Times, Nicely...

This happened. The editor thinks it's a book of dog sitter stories waiting to happen. I am scribbling away at same... I first house-sat by accident. I was originally at Haven House, Lembton, as a live-in safety net for Lady Olive Simmonds, a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian with a lilac afro, a Temazepam habit and leg ulcers. Haven House was by the sea. Eighteenth century, elegant, comfortable. But there was Olive... Always in pain; either drunk, hungover or both; barely educated. She had married a man who was knighted, and believed this gave her a licence to be a twat. According to Olive, her fellow Lembtonians were all dull academics - this group having reading ages older than hers, which was thirteen - or failed schizophrenics. She had serious monophobia, with staff working (unnecessarily) every day apart from weekends. At weekends, first thing, anxious, she would ring round the Lembtonians that were still speaking to her - six in number - inviting them for coffee, ...

The Marine Says I Must Re-queer...

Being camp in Camp Basra... Stacks, ex-Royal Marines Commando, recently watched my Tutu Went AWOL! show on Zoom. He had notes. I was shifting from foot to foot, he said, and gesturing too much. 'And you must put back the stuff about the Brigadier and your fellow comedian being homophobic...' The Brigadier had been sneering about my act, saying it would be more suited to Butlins. But, more importantly, he believed I was an 'inappropriate influence on 42 Commando'. Stacks, deadpan, commented, 'Sir, before Iestyn started hanging out with us, sir, it had never occurred to him to play Tiddlywinks with anything other than his thumb, sir.' My fellow comedian, who I'll call Mark, because that's his name, asked Reg, Garrison Sergeant Major, in front of ...

I Love the Library

Therese, soprano, never uses a library. ‘Oh, no, Iestyn. Unlike you, I pride myself on always buying my books.’ I agree with Helene Hanff, who said that buying a book you haven’t read is like buying a dress without trying it on. ‘How do you know the dress will fit, Therese?’ I asked. ‘I always know what’s going to fit me, book-wisely speaking. I tune into asking the universe what it needs me to read for the greater good, go into the bookshop and find that I’m drawn to a department, then a section of carpet, then the particular shelf and there will book the book, in a sort of outline of almost light picked out from the others around it.’ ‘But there are billions of books out there, Therese, in umpteen shops, divided into squillions of bits of carpet and…’ She was giving me her look: a nurse at my hospital bed telling me the prognosis was far from ideal. ‘Yes, but with me it’s narrowed down q...

Iestyn Edwards is...what?

Search This Blog