il cielo che danza

Flying sailing ships, illuminated spheres, exquisitely costumed dancers and acrobats on wires transformed the skies above Elder Park into an extraordinary fantasy world last night for one of the most spectacular Adelaide Festival openings ever staged.

Up to 30,000 people crammed the park and its surrounds to watch the world premiere of Il Cielo che Danza, or The Dancing Sky, especially created by Italian company Studio Festi for the Adelaide setting.

More than a dozen giant helium-filled balloons, decorated with Baroque and Renaissance style paintings, rose like multi-coloured moons and planets to float above the spectators and travel along the River Torrens, towed by speedboats.

The Advertiser, March 4, 2006

Studio Festi are the same group that performed in the 2006 Winter Olympic Opening Ceremony in Torino... which is where Ma saw them, which is why she wanted to go and see them while they were performing here.

After I saw the pictures in the paper, and the little snippety bits that cropped up at the end of teevee news broadcasts, I was starting to be equally jazzed about going... it looked just spectacular.

Walking down to the riverbank, we saw this balloon and I managed to get two or three good shots of it, and seeing how gorgeous it looked, I was still looking forward to the performance.

And the bits of it we actually managed to see were quite beautiful... slightly overrated perhaps, but beautiful...

But the combination of the crowd (the park was so far beyond packed it wasn't even funny), and our seating position in relation to the majority of what was going on (crappy) left me with a decidedly "m'eh" attitude.

I mean, it was pretty and all... and the two balloons that were featured on the cover of the Advertiser were gorgeous (when we could see them), as was the balloon Ma and I saw on our way down to the riverbank when it was all lit up... and it came down into the crowd at the end with an acrobat girly swinging underneath it, so that was definately a plus... I just wished my digital camera would focus in low light worth a damn... it won't... that's one of the flat out flaws with my particular camera...

I also had some major crowd issues... between not being about to see anything because either kids were standing up or people were moving through the crowd after the performance had started and the fact that it was just wall to wall people, I was less happy (although happier than I would have been if I'd had to actually move through a crowd like that). When we arrived there was still space between groups of people... by the time the performance actually started, there wasn't a spare piece of grass anywhere. And there were people all the way along the riverbank... that was kind of amazing.

I've never been comfortable with that many people in that confined an area... I don't know what it is, it just makes me crazy.

Because Adelaide can be such a small place, I said to Ma that it was highly likely that we would see at least one person that one or other of us knew... and I did... one of the girlies who works at Baker's Delight wandered past with, I'm guessing, her parents. And she saw me, and we waved and did that long distance hello thing, so I can't give her a hard time about "ignoring me"...

Even though it wasn't that far from my place, we decided to take Ma's car down and ended up parking along with about a bazillion other people on the parklands outside the cricket grounds... which made it fun when it came time for everyone to leave... luckily we followed a car that decided to go in the opposite direction to everyone else, and the driver took down a barrier thing so that they could take a short cut over to the lane of traffic that was actually moving, so Ma and I and two or three other cars followed them. Thank you Random White Stationwagon People! You made getting out of the carpark much less of an exercise in boredom.

Ma and I are thinking about giving it another go tomorrow night, going down even earlier and trying to score a good spot down at the bend of the river. Not sure whether either of us will decide we can be bothered or not, but hopefully being a Sunday there will be less people... probably not, but I can hope.

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