By NATALIE TSAY
As someone who danced ballet for almost 16 years, I was constantly asked during senior year if I’d be dancing in college. When I answered with a hesitant “No,” almost everybody said, “Well you’ll miss it, won’t you?” So far I haven’t been longing to slip (well, more like cram) my pointe shoes back on, but seeing Ithaca Ballet’s performance of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and “Alice in Wonderland” did remind me how fun it can be to be on stage.
The show began with “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Legend has it that in the late thirteenth century, 130 children went missing from the German town of Hamelin and were never found. Ithaca Ballet’s take, based primarily on folklore surrounding the mystery, went something like this: The Mayor of Hamelin forces the townspeople — mostly women because, hey, it’s ballet — to build a clock tower; rats appear and hinder construction, and the Mayor promises the Pied Piper money if he can rid the town of the pests with his music. He can, and so the town rejoices and dances when he does so, The Mayor fails to pay the promised price, and the Pied Piper lures the children of the village into the mountains as revenge.
Courtesy of the Ithaca Ballet