Bad Fairy

WHEN GOOD
FAIRIES GO BAD

I recently shared the costumes for Scottish Ballet's The Fairy's Kiss with you and last week I got to see them brought to life in the performance. 

The Fairy's Kiss is a one act ballet, but they cram plenty of beauty and drama into the hour. It was positively magical. From the opening scene to the last, I smiled the whole entire time.

The premise of the story is simple: a boy is kissed by a fairy as a child and is cursed to live forever, unknown to him. We later see the child, now a man, celebrating his engagement to a pretty village girl. However, he is soon tempted away by a sultry gypsy women who reveals herself to be the fairy in disguise. He is smitten with her and she whisks him away with her to a realm "beyond time and place", leaving the poor village girl distraught.

What I really liked about this story is that the role of the fairy is subverted. Usually, these omnipotent creatures use their power for good, but in this ballet the fairy is quite happy to steal away a child for her own purposes and temp him away from his fiance when he is grown. She is far more like the conniving Odile than any of the fairies in Sleeping Beauty, for example. However somethings don't change. Namely male ballet characters. They are all so easily tempted away from their loves and/or tricked into thinking someone is someone else! Seriously how dumb are these men? Don't they ever look at faces?!

The Fairy, performed perfectly by Constance Devernay, was a joy to watch. She hit every position beautifully and never missed a single beat. A powerhouse of a dancer, Constance's fairy was sultry and playful with a hefty dose of badass.

Andrew Peasgood played our hapless boy and Bethany Kingsley-Garner was absolutely perfect as the jilted village girl. Both dancers brought such vibrancy to these roles that not smiling simply wasn't an option.