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The real geniuses of our times

In a crazy time when the big prizes go to the entrepreneurs, the code-writers and the actuaries, ballet offers an  escape from the madness and a chance to see true genius in action.

I defy all those start-up millionaires and tech geniuses to go watch Polarity, the third ballet in Cape Town City Ballet’s three-part bill, Ikigai, and imagine writing the ‘code’ for that.

The triple bill opens with Jiří Kylián’s percussive Falling Angels, which is mesmerising and intense.

It is the perfect warm up for dancers and audience. It starts slowly, the lights a little too bright, the dancers creeping tentatively … an intentional awkwardness. The journey starts slowly, dancers and audience finding rhythm together. 

There is a special magic to this communal warming on a blustery and cold Cape Town night when we are still quite unused to being out and about. We, too, warm up slowly to each other as we lean in, a little awkwardly at first, then the relief of a warm hug. ‘Hi’, ‘It has been too long’, and ‘Brrr, it is cold outside’. 

It is not our first night out, even our first night out after the pandemic, but it has a sparkly, one-of-a-kind feel to it. 

We are watching geniuses at work and we are surrounded by mavericks, crazies, bohemians and all the other Special Ones. I searched the audience for someone unremarkable, to no avail. This was a night when everyone was living (and wearing) their best dream.

Ikigai, a textured extravaganza of a show, is an impressive counterpoint to Veronica Paeper’s absolutely splendid Romeo and Juliet, also playing at Artscape this winter.

We had expected ballet #2, Sir Frederick Ashton’s Les Patineurs, to be the standout delight of the night. It is the one ballet of the three we dedicated Cape Town City Ballet fans had not seen before.

Les Patineurs is an older ballet, written in the 1930s, and first danced by Margot Fonteyn but it was new to us. 

It is very charming and clever, the concept of a ballet about the elegance of ice-skating. Depictions of thrills and spills on the ice add a layer of challenge for the dancers and pleasure for the audience.

The thing that really knocked us off our feet, however, was the genius of the third ballet, Kenneth Tindall’s Polarity. The body of 17 dancers, 68 limbs, transfixed us. It is mesmerising as it tells a thousand stories and inspires so many more feelings. Appropriate words are a little harder to find for feelings that welled up and washed over as we watched.

This extended version of the ballet written for Cape Town City Ballet in 2019 is still not long enough. We are satisfied but left longing by this ballet about harmony and conflict. Snatches of fighting and then holding, hurting then healing pull us in and around the stage.

We are also apart from it, amazed at the juxtaposition of friction and fluidity, awed as raw, earthly muscle meets celestial grace. The dancers become one and then 17 again, extraordinary lighting moving us around the stage and transporting us far from it, as only the best visual music can.

This creation really is the work of a genius. I hope the coders and the crypto maniacs step away from the altar of the www and watch this and try to imagine ‘coding’ it.

The season runs to August 28. Bookings can be made at Artscape Dial-A-Seat 021 421 7695 or through Computicket.

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