Light of Passage

  

Inevitably, things have to slow down today. Yesterday was fabulous, but today, I’m feeling very tired, and it’s a lazy morning just relaxing in the hotel. 

We decide to visit the Flowers in Contemporary Art and Culture in the Saatchi Gallery and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It’s a large exhibition, quite eclectically curated, with some really beautiful flower photography as well as coverage of flowers in art, fashion, fabrics etc. Probably the most spectacular room the work of Rebecca Lewis Law, a huge installation of dried flowers completely filling one of the rooms.

We head back to the hotel for a short but much needed rest, before going to the Royal Opera House for tonight’s performance. We meet Simon in the Paul Hamlyn Hall for a pre-performance meal - Lloyd has another engagement. 

Then it’s Light of Passage, a full length ballet by Crystal Pite to Gorecki’s Symphony No 3 - Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a piece most of you will be familiar with if only for its second movement. Light of Passage is absolutely stunning; hugely emotional - the music, the fabulous choreography and the underlying themes of refugees, the rights of children  (wonderful performances from children of the Royal Ballet School) and the power of loss (with two dancers from Sadlers Wells Company of Elders) We are all sitting separately in different parts of the stalls, and we come together moved, mesmerised and emotionally drained. It’s one of the most wonderful pieces of dance I’ve seen. 

Then we’re plunged back into a nightmare reality when we get back to our hotel and watch the unbelievable bullying behaviour of Vance and Trump in the Oval Office. It’s the ugly antithesis of everything we’ve experienced this evening - yet it also throws the inhumane displacement of people seen in Light of Passage into a spotlight of relevance. 


And it’s a curtain call from Light of Passage that has to be my main - though the flower collages from the Saatchi Gallery contain better photographs.