Saturday, November 29, 2014

Mao's Beijing on the Güaire: the Grand Chavez ballet company

It looks like chavismo will never run out of idiotic ideas. Yesterday we saw how we paid for them with oil prices plummeting. Today journalist Andreina Marquez (@mintina)  attended a ballet performance.  Words fail common sense....  Here are some of her tweets.




The ballet is, of course, on the life of Chavez. I do not have the program but from the title of that tweet it seems that it means something like from Chavez to Bolivar, or vise-versa, or something (Arañero in chavista terms means like a spider knitting a tale). Maybe meaning "how Chavez became a Libertador himself, one better than Bolivar?At any rate the mood is set, including the "Samán de Güere" under which Chavez allegedly swore an oath, the tree under which Bolivar took a nap or something. I refuse to familiarize myself with silly chavista lore...

The next one, well, is a recreation of parachutist descent in some 1992 coup, or Chavez career or something. The silliness of that on such an austere stage speaks for itself (apparently the crisis has already struck ballet decorators, red berets and military fatigues kindled sponsored by some military barrack).



Of course all the official heroes of Venezuelan history approved by Chavez make an appearance, including Chavez himself. Ghostly and even ghastly.

Fortunately, personality cult and all, it seems that it was not a big hit since the chavista crowd was rather sparse. Too much is just too much? But just you wait until it becomes mandatory any time soon.

Besides congratulating Andreina for the courage and stamina to attend, I cannot fail to remember all those heroic ballets and operas from Maoist China, you know, those ones where the soprano prances around with a machine gun while the tenor drops straight from the survivors of the Long March to rescue the villagers. These are probably today relegated to minor stages where only tourists and sad communists go. But what do I know?
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PS: it looks like foreign correspondents got more advanced information than locals like yours truly that learned about the ballet from Twitter. Our good friends at Babalu point out to two reviews, one from the Times and the other from the Guardian, which inspired the former, as if these did not have better things to review... What surprises me in these reviews, rather the Guardian's, is on how they rely more on local "critics" than their actual attendance...  As such, my review above out from Andreina's tweets is way more telling than theirs. Sorry...

And as I should have suspected, the Cubans are behind the whole show, probably cashing a hefty fee for their services. Prove me wrong!


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