Ballet and Street Food

Today was my first experience with ballet in central Europe! I went to a matinee at the Opera House to see the Hungarian National Ballet perform Troy Game and La Sylphide. There was also a big festival today on the same street as the Opera House!

The Opera House
The Operaház is gorgeous, and I was sitting in a box. In the theater at home, all the boxes are on the sides, so I think they don't tend to be terribly good seats, but the boxes here go all the way around the circle, and I was near the center.

The Opera House! The screen outside was for a festival going on today.

Inside the theater

Some of the boxes on the Dress Circle level

Troy Game
This ballet, choreographed by Robert North, is really unusual in that all the dancers are men. It's a short, humorous piece structured around the premise of these men doing athletic training. The beginning of the ballet looks like a parody of the jazz dance class sections I used do in recitals, and then the group starts doing partner acrobatics, until someone crawls out from a bottom of a pyramid, causing it to collapse. That pretty much sets the tone for the ballet as a whole.

I expect a ballet with all men to have lots of high-flying leaps, but that wasn't really the case. There were leaps, but they didn't tend to be that impressive on their own. It was really the combinations as a whole that I liked; there were some petite allegro sequences I'd love to learn. I also think it was really important that the dancers be really in control and finish all the movements in order for the choreography to work. I was impressed with a lot of the precision involved in the dancing.

The bows were very much part of the ballet. Each man did an individual bow two or three times and did some little bit of dancing for the bow (One man did two huge toe-touches), but the bows also continued a joke about one of the characters and included the other seven men chasing the one on and off stage.

La Sylphide
I think pairing Troy Game with La Sylphide is a little strange, but it works with the lengths of the ballets, and La Sylphide focuses more on the female dancers, so in that way it's a good contrast. I had never seen Sylphide live before, so this was exciting!

This is the kind of ballet where I love the first act and am somewhat ambivalent about the second act simply because the first act is full of character dance, but the second act is almost entirely white ballet. While the corps work in good white ballet is beautiful, at some point Sylphs, Swans, Wilis, and Shades don't feel very different. The Sylphide is playful and flirtatious, but the other Sylphs don't have much personality.

That said, all the corps work was excellent. Most of the female dancers were both village women in the first act and Sylphs in the second act, and they were almost always together in both character dance and pointe work. I really liked the Scottish-flavored corps choreography in the first act. There are also two fun first act solos that I liked, and they were back to back, danced by the two lead men, James (Timofeev Dmitry) and Gurn (Majoros Balazs). These were both mostly petite allegro with lots of jumps with beats. Timofeev's leaps were more powerful than Majoros', but that fit the music and the characters.

Timofeev had another solo that's mostly petite allegro, that one in the second act. James and the Sylphide (Felmery Lili) danced something in the second act that is very like a grand pas, except without the partnered portion. James' second act solo included three double tours en l'air in a row, one to the right, one to the left, and then to the right again, which is pretty incredible.

Car Free Day in Budapest
One of the huge avenues in Budapest is Andrassy Ut, and today most of it was closed to car traffic for a big festival. Before the ballet started, I walked by what I think was an opening ceremony, and I listened to a children's choir. They sang for at least half an hour, and they ended with "A zene az kell," a song from a Hungarian movie made after WWII:

After the ballet, I walked up and down most of Andrassy. The stalls near the Opera House were mostly food stalls, but as I walked closer to home, there was more variety: stages with performers (short plays, music, even circus arts), tents with activities for kids, stalls selling crafts, and booths about various towns and regions in Hungary. I stopped a few times and bought food:

Gombócs! These are warm, sweet dumplings. One of them has chocolate inside, and the other has plum. I could have eaten several more of these.

Sajtos lángos - traditional Hungarian bread with cheese. The last time I had lángos it was more like a thick pita, but this time it reminded me of fry bread. Also, I am evidently the only person in Budapest who orders this without sour cream.

Lemonade and a csokis palacsinta (chocolate pancake/crepe). I drank most of the lemonade before I took the picture, but you can see the bits of lemon, orange, and lime that were in the lemonade.