I’ll be humming that film all day long

Wednesday, 07 December 2011 12:57

Written by Editor

On a recent work trip to Barcelona I went armed with my trusty laptop, raring to enjoy the luxury of wearing headphones to immerse myself in a film while waiting at the boarding gate and during the flight. It is slightly annoying how the crew on a flight always say that you have to turn off all electrical devices because the plane is taking off or landing or going through a bumpy patch and yet they never announce that you can turn them on again. You kind of have to guess when you can get away with opening up your laptop and carry on viewing.

Last week I decided to watch the Natalie Portman film, Black Swan as I winged my way towards the Catalan capital but I hadn’t thought things through properly. I’m used to the lengthy flights back and forwards to the UK and the short hop to Barca meant that I didn’t get through the whole film. As it happens, I didn’t get through half of the film because by the time I landed back in Malaga the next day, I still had 10 minutes of the film to go.  As  I write this, I still haven’t seen those last few minutes so I can’t spoil the tension for anyone else by saying if she dies at the end or not!

Black Swan, for those that haven’t seen the film, is about a ballet dancer who, having won the role of her dreams as the lead dancer in Swan Lake, finds that the pressure exerted on her by the maniacal director and the other jealous ballerinas, pushes her over a mental cliff into paranoia and beyond. Adding to the mix some very graphic images of the physical effects on a dancer’s body with an over controlling mother who is trying to live out her own ambitions through her daughter, the film manages to turn ballet dancing into an edgy, pressurised storyline.

Anyway, the point of all this was to talk about the music. Obviously the film contains a lot of music. Mainly the same pieces repeated time after time as accompaniment to our heroine’s attempts to please the evil but brilliant director played by French actor Vincent Cassell. Although I saw Swan Lake at the South Bank many years ago, I didn’t realise how much of the music was still familiar to me. What surprised me more was that after we’d landed at Malaga, I couldn’t stop humming the music!

While I waited for the luggage to arrive on the Yo Sushi style belt, I could not stop humming. Worse than that, I actually considered taking off across the smooth and very empty airport concourse, in what I imagined could be an elegant and fluid imitation of Prince Siegfried. I could see myself pirouetting past belts 24 to 37 and coming to a beautifully executed stop and pose outside the AENA office. I somehow knew that this would please and delight my fellow patient sushi lovers and through some shared transference, they would hear the music ringing round my brain. Or maybe it would just magically start coming out of the tannoy. What I envisioned was a kind of classical ballet solo flashmob and an audience so enthralled that their cases went round unnoticed at least three times.

When I started to think about the practicalities of my debut in performance dance, the first hurdle that came to mind was where I would find ballet shoes in size 13. I mean I have enough problems finding trainers and finding shoes to go with a suit is a nightmare to find in Spain. Can you imagine trying to get ballet slippers in European size 49 or 50 from a shoe shop in Coín? And you have to be so careful with what you take on as hand luggage these days. No, if I was going to start breaking into spontaneous ballet performances across airport arrival lounges, it would have to be barefoot. As my own suitcase passed me for the third time the spell broke. Reality came flooding in as I realised the whole idea of dancing across the airport was preposterous. Aside from the barefoot issue, free-spirited dancers don’t have to worry about leaving their hand luggage unattended and a suit for the office is no match for ballet tights or a leotard. Add to this the creaking knees, flat feet, lack of rhythm and the overriding issues of the aerodynamics of beergut, I deflatedly picked up my case and shuffled out of the terminal. Annoyingly though, I still had the musical taunting me between the ears.

By Ricky Leach