The Culture Blog
Ballet Shoes
Showing your appreciation for a show is all well and good, but there’s a reason you pay to hear an orchestra and not several hundred people clapping over it.
Three years ago, I was in New York for Christmas. On my last night I got cheap seats to see The Nutcracker at The Met. I sat next to a couple up in the Big Apple for a few days sightseeing and Christmas shopping. They spoke with broad, Southern accents and, boy, did they speak a lot. Not a pirouette or plié went by without one of them exclaiming: “Gawd!” Every lift, every twirl, was accompanied by a tense inhalation through the teeth followed by a “now, would you look at that.” When the Sugar Plum Fairy came on in the second act the husband asked agog: “How does she do that?” As the performance wore on, his admiration grew in both ardour and volume. The spectacle of the Sugar Plum Fairy held aloft by her swain brought much whooping and stamping of feet. By the curtain call, he was carrying on for all the world as if he were at Madison Square Gardens.
He wasn’t the only culprit. When the conductor mounted his podium the audience applauded, when the lights went down for a scene change the audience applauded. When the corps de ballet finished a particularly difficult number the audience applauded. Every break in the score, every entrance or exit by a principal dancer, every difficult step was accompanied by a burst of clapping. In a two hour production, the audience must have applauded on average once every three minutes.
I was reminded of this on New Year’s Eve when I again sat watching a production of The Nutcracker, this time at Covent Garden. We Brits aren’t quite as enthusiastic as the Americans but there was still an eruption of applause every five minutes.
This over-clapping business is a weird and relatively new phenomenon and it’s to the detriment of the production. It is disruptive to constantly rouse yourself to clap when you ought to be immersed in a performance. One unfortunate by-product is the drowning out of the opening bars of each movement by the noise of the audience. I suspect this mania for clapping is borne out of X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing formats where contestants are applauded for every high note and cheered for every hip thrust.
Silence is important to the Royal Opera House. The back page of The Nutcracker programme advises: “Silence sponsored by Sela-Cough. Ushers at the desk can provide free cough sweets.” Someone on the corporate side recognises that nothing is more intrusive and distracting than a solitary cougher in the stalls. There are other afflictions not solvable by cough sweets. The man in the row behind me tapped his foot (not) in time to the music throughout and periodically turned to his wife and daughter to say (not so) sotto voce that such and such a dancer was looking a bit thin or that one of the fairies had a snowflake on her nose.
This is not a case of snobbery. An evening at the ballet is a rare treat. A once a year thing. Twice if you’re lucky. Seats in the stalls at the Royal Opera House are £85. You can see U2 for less than that. And of course, people should enjoy the performance and of course they should clap. But not constantly. Not with horrible staccato, start-stop suddenness. Save your applause for the curtain call. Ushers at the desk can provide free mittens.
Good point – I applaud you (silently).
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