I'm, like, totally cultured.

I'm on several mailing lists for events in Korea, as well as facebook groups and other ways of keeping up with what's going on. In general, I will either delete the messages I'm sent or barely skim them if something looks vaguely interesting. In one of these emails, I happened to notice that the Seoul Arts Center was putting on not one, but two ballets for the Christmas season - Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. I took several years of ballet as a child, but I'd never actually been to see a real ballet before (and by real, I mean a ballet company performing, and not my school or another children's school). So I called up Kathryn to see if she wanted to go to one with me. We settled on the Sunday matinee of Swan Lake on a Sunday, which was amazing to watch.



I did get a little confused about the story line - it'd been a while since I'd been exposed to the story, and all I really remembered was Odette was a swan who had to be on a lake when the moon was out in order to turn back into a person.


Then I got a message from another friend, who had wanted to go to see The Nutcracker. My parents had a VHS copy of Baryshnikov dancing in The Nutcracker ballet that I practically wore out as a kid, so I knew that story quite well. The ballet they performed in Seoul was remarkably similar to the Baryshnikov one, with the exception of another pair of dolls danced with each other, while in the original it had been Clara and the Prince doing their goodbye dance. There was even a growing tree as the backdrop, and the Asian dancers were made up to look English from a distance.


.

They were both lovely performances, and I felt quite cultured (and lucky) that I got to see both