Entress

‘Entress’ is an old Scots word meaning ‘an entrance, or the right to enter a place’.  It’s also a sublime new ballet from The Scottish Ballet Company.  The lead performance in the advertising is ‘Embrace’; the hive mind with, amongst other things, the most impressive ‘en pointe’ routines I’ve ever witnessed.  Kudos to those ballerinas; they took several curtain calls, even in Aberdeen.  The place where someone once told Ricki Fulton, about his comedy show, “That was great, it was all I could to stop myself laughing”.  Aberdeen in a nutshell.  Tight.  In every aspect of the word. 

Drove to Aberdeen on Friday for the ballet.  I remember Friday nights in Aberdeen in the 90s.  Oil industry at peak wealth and the city reflected it.  Full employment, so much so that we incomers were known as ‘white settlers’.  The town was safe and swinging.  Was in my early thirties, granted, but even so, the sight of it last Friday was so sad.  Shops shut, roadworks killing the main street by pedestrianisation – which has taken years and still hasn’t finished.  Shops that do exist closed by six, couldn’t even get a coffee in Pret.  Sisters’ shop stays open, and had it to myself apart from a few young German tourists whizzing through.  Restaurant windows that used to twinkle, their clientele full of laughter, now all closed down.  It is a sorry state of affairs, no doubt repeated all over the country.  

The first ballet of the evening, ‘Empress’, gave the audience the portal, and right, to enter a transforming state.  Haunting score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, and the specialist percussionist from China had us falling out of our skins and into the sublime emotions that only ballet conjures.  No night blindness on the drive home, aided and abetted by a near-full moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K92FW1j4g5A&t