In the City of Dreaming Spires: "The Snow Queen"

I’ve known Brittany Reed since kindergarten. It’s one of the beautiful things about growing up in a small town. While we ended high school with different groups of close friends, we had countless honors classes together, danced for the same ballet company, and played volleyball on the same team. We attended a few of each other’s birthday parties growing up, and were members of the same mother-daughter book club. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Brittany was also going to be in Oxford this semester! She is here studying at the international college, St. Clare’s. We met for lunch one day in early October, and then decided to meet to see the English National Ballet’s “The Snow Queen” at the New Theatre on George Street here in Oxford.

New Theatre is directly across the street from the OSAP office, which has been my home base while I’ve been in Oxford. The theatre is always decorated with posters for shows, but the building looks so small from the outside. Brittany and I paid £10 each for the cheapest tickets possible. When we entered the theatre, we were shocked by its size! It’s definitely bigger than a lot of the theatres I’ve been to in London, and I’m sure it’s larger than the Pantages in Hollywood.

The ballet was absolutely beautiful, but very interesting. “The Snow Queen” is a new ballet, created by Michael Corder using the music of Serge Prokofiev and the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andresen. The only other ballet I’d ever witnessed was “The Nutcracker” as performed by a local ballet company, so “The Snow Queen” was a new experience for me. While “The Nutcracker” is very story driven, “The Snow Queen” felt more like a recital of solo pieces. The only solo dances in “The Nutcracker” are the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy”, “Tarantella”, and “Pas de Deux”. “The Snow Queen”, however, was more of an exhibition of beautiful and elegant dances between the main characters. As soon as I arrived back at my flat, I looked up the story on Wikipedia. It is really a quite entertaining and complex Danish fairy tale, and it was so interesting to read a children’s story from another country. It was a privilege to experience the English National Ballet without even having to leave Oxford.