Una noche con Kylián

It was Cristina's idea to go see the Compañía Nacional de Danza perform three of choreographer Jirí Kylián's pieces tonight. There were posters like this:

all around the city of Madrid, so I was excited to see it. 


The performance was held at the Teatro de la Zarzuela (pronounced sar-swell-a), close to Plaza del Sol (smack dab in the middle of Madrid).

And the inside of the theater was a bit larger than the New Victory Theater in NYC

and I had cheap-for-under-26-year-olds seats on the first tier (primer piso) where I could see everything that was happening on the stage very well.


Kylián was a contemporary ballet choreographer of the late 20th century, and his pieces were as strange as they were inspiring. The three performed pieces were Sleepless, Petite Mort, and Sinfonía de los Salmos. My favorite piece was the last one, where for 25 minutes none of the ballet dancers left the stage, all the while expressing their exhaustion as was written into the dance. 


But for humor's sake, the best sentence from the program pamphlet is the following sentence, talking about the second piece, Petite Mort: "Petite Mort, que literalmente significa muerta pequeña, es también, en lenguas como el francés y el árabe, paráfrasis de orgasmo." Reader, even with your broken Spanish you can translate this to: "Petite Mort, literally meaning small death, is also, in languages such as French and Arabic, a paraphrasing of orgasm." And so it was.