Tonight we went to this concert, which was absolutely fabulous. My friend scoffed and said she had seen enough Georgian dancing. But we hadn't and she missed a treat.
It began 20 minutes late with lots of false starts of clapping. The theatre was full and this was apparently an extra performance put on because of the demand, so it was not just us who thought it was good.
It began rather strangely with an film from the 1920s or so it seemed from the clothes, though it's not quite how you think of the Soviet Union at the time. The film clips seemed more reminiscent of Berlin. It seemed this was an introduction to a similar performance in the past.
The orchestra consisted of accordions, drums, some strings I don't know the name of and ditto some wind instruments of the early music period. They sat at the back of the stage rather than in the pit, which was nice because you could see who was playing what, though it was mainly very fast rhythms to dance to. the sound system was not so wonderful as occasionally we got that painful high pitched whine of feedback.
But the dancing and costumes were fabulous. Strictly speaking it wasn't ballet or even modern dance, more like arrangements of traditional dances into chorus lines, but much much faster for the men and rather slower for the women. The women glided around the stage in long dresses, with only arm movements, their feet hidden, moving rather like Daleks, while the men minced (not quite the right word for such warlike men) around the women, occasionally on their toes like ballerinas but without the blocks in their shoes, just on their toes.
The men, wearing the traditional coats with a row of bullets on each side of the chest, a belt with a sword and skirts to the coat which twirled out while they span, had a range of dancing covering military skills: marching in line, riding horses, and sword fights which knocked the kung-fu and cowboy movies for a six. In one dance the opponents each twirled with two swords which clashed at every twirl sending real sparks flying, all at a furious pace set by the music. Another pair ducked, jumped and twirled, rebounding off each other by jumping off the other's shoulders. Then there were the cossack like leaps and circles but some were done from and to the knees, in fact with one dancer doing a complete circle of the stage on his knees.
There were also the white shaggy hats and white shaggy boots, plus the dance with the bottle on the head. The costume for that seems to bear some resemblance to a Russian party commissar (leather jacket, peaked cap) which is a bit strange.
Towards the end the women got more lively, even showing their ankles and giving high kicks. At one stage there was even a dance of four men, two of whom seemed to wriggle a bit more provocatively than usual and at the end they threw off their hats to reveal that they were in were women.
Here are some videos I found on Youtube which give you some idea of the speed and costumes.
I haven't seen anything as good since "Fires of Anatolia" a Turkish show which I saw in Ljubljana last year. It seemed I never blogged about it, so you will need to go here and there's a Youtube movie here. But watching the video, it's much more modern, and theatrical, whereas the Sukhishvili ballet was just traditional dance and music
