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This afternoon, after a bit of behind the scenes finangling, I joined Nicoline then KSP and Jonas for a drive into the city. We ended up outside the flats where Mirinda has been holed up for the last month. We loaded the car with her various chattels, then headed towards the centre of Stockholm. With expert ease (like Jonas, I’m ignoring the red light) Jonas found a parking space directly outside Dansens Hus, our destination for the night.
We were there to watch a ballet. Yes, I know, it’s not my ideal way to spend a night but it was only 70 minutes and it was conceived and choreographed by Wayne McGregor, so it did have those things going for it.
It was called Deepstaria and is an exploration of life in the deep, dark ocean. At least that’s what I thought it was about. Nine dancers, noise pretending to be music and quite the amazing lighting, showed us a thing or two about life in the void. (Of course, that is barely scratching the surface of what it was about. Follow the link above for a much fuller synopsis.)
The title comes from a strange species of jellyfish, which Nicoline called a legless octopus, which, I think, serves the interpretation well and gave me an excellent title for this post. The dancers all writhe about and flap their hands like the missing tentacles, into and out of the light. The blackness provided the void.
Mirinda loved it. I stayed awake. I’m fairly sure the others weren’t that enthused but the rest of the packed house was pretty much over the moon.
Following the glorious entertainment, we headed up to Drottninggatan to partake of dinner at the Restaurant Rydberg, a favourite haunt of Nicoline’s though she was very unimpressed with the new paint job. She complained to the young waiter about the lack of maroon.
The food, the company, the wine were all excellent as we chatted the night away ahead of returning to the car and, eventually, Trosa.
We picked the girls up from Lasse and Kristina, where they’d spent a lovely time, before, finally, settling in for the night.
An excellent excursion, in excellent company, even though we missed Melo this week.
Not exactly the deep void but your title put me in mind of a book I read-
‘Other Minds’ from 2016 by the Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith on the evolution and nature of consciousness and featuring his study of Octopuses
Might be one for your reading hour 😀
Excellent! Thank you, Neil. I am always on the lookout for non-fiction books for my Reading Hour.