Going for the Gold... I mean Bronze!

Arron Scott in American Ballet Theatre's La Bayadere


Ever have a dream? Did you ever work toward a single dream for over a decade and have it come true? Ravenboy has been steadily coming closer to dancing his dream role of the Bronze Idol in the ballet La Bayadere. He first saw a video of the solo when he was 10 years old and here it is, almost a dozen years later, he just had a dress rehearsal for it.

His Bronze Idol solo opens the act. He is the only dancer on the stage sitting lotus style at the top of a steep flight of steps at the base of a Buddha shrine. He descends the stairs while looking automaton-like straight into the audience. The dynamic and demanding variation is done wearing a huge ornate head piece and loin cloth, nothing else. A solid gold sheen, he wears full body paint that takes a half an hour to apply. Mineral oil with some type of gilt glitter, it does not come off easily but anything that sweats off is immediately wiped up by a stage hand dedicated to following the dance around until the curtain rises.

A thin gauze curtain, or scrim, is another difficulty that the dancer faces when performing this variation. The lighting on the dancer and the stage allows the audience to see the beginning of the act through the scrim but the dancer cannot see anything but a huge blank wall in front of him, no audience, no lights. This makes accuracy and stability of turns more difficult because it is hard to orient where a dancer has to spot or look for each turn. That and the heavy head piece make pirouettes , double tours or any turning leaps very difficult.

The Bronze Idol gets a solo curtain call at the end of La Bayadere. This requires the dancer to stay in the gold paint for quite a while and Ravenboy was warned it could make him ill. He said it made him a little dizzy. Oil based, it took the help of the costumer, Bruce Horowitz, to start scrubbing it off.

Yesterday's dress rehearsal was also a "tech rehearsal" and they were running it for time. After he completed his solo, he said to Bruce that he was ready to do it again! Bruce said he was crazy and also told Ravenboy that it was the best first time through he had ever seen anyone do. I wonder if Bruce saw Baryshinkov's first time though Bronze Idol while he was at the company?