sunfright | wednesday.

26. by Fani Papageorgiou

We can no longer stay in our heads.
We have no peace.
A zigzag across our hearts.

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Someone uploaded a series of really beautiful "seen from above" shots of the most recent Royal Danish Ballet Giselle production and this was one of my favourite pictures from it! Giselle is Holly Dorger and Albrecht is Jon Axel Fransson. It's just so atmospheric and beautiful. Really captures the feeling of that specific moment.

Also, bonus:

J'aime Crandall as Giselle, my very first ballerina I saw in the role. She was a better 2nd act choice than 1st act, but this shot from her mad scene is just gorgeous and it deserved to be shared.

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Royal Danish Ballet - Giselle

And here it is, should anyone be interested. The full 2016 production of the Royal Danish Ballet's Giselle is available for free on YouTube. It is the first cast with Ida Praetorius as Giselle, Andreas Kaas as Albrecht, Sebastian Haynes as Hilarion and Jonathan Chmelensky and Caroline Baldwin in the the peasant pas de deux, with Kizzy Matiakis as Myrtha in the second act. The main cast isn't my first pick, but they have a very interesting and different interpretation of the roles and the acting is very good, so it's worth a watch, definitely.

I have another version on DVD with Holly Dorger and Ulrik Birkkjær in the leads, their debuts in the role and that one is by far my preferred, but since it isn't widely available, the other one is the one I always recommend. It gives a good idea of the production as a whole and where the Royal Danish Ballet were as a company at the time.

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WHAT'S GOING ON IN RL
Waiting, just waiting. Counting down the days. It's tomorrow, so not many hours left. I slept okay-ish last night, though I don't expect much sleep tonight at all. Today I'll try to write a bit to distract myself, but if that doesn't work, I'm just gonna watch those two performances of Giselle back to back and be distracted passively instead.

First, though, I have my social worker meeting this morning and we have some stuff we need to look at, so that's work before play, I guess.

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WHAT'S GOING ON IN RP/WRITING
Decided to do an impromptu X-mas calendar for my girlfriend with ficlets and drabbles about

figureheading, an original character from a huge universe that we've written from and played in for a decade, give or take. I got the first one done yesterday, so today I'll try my luck with something else along the same vein. There are 25 prompts on my prompt table, so just enough for a fic each day until X-mas, though we celebrate on the 24th in Denmark, not the 25th. We'll see what I do about that extra day.

For this project, I'm listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen, since that's the vibe I'm going for and I rediscovered a Danish cover CD with translated numbers of his that came out... also about a decade ago, it's ancient. But very, very good. My favourite is this one, Din Gamle Blå Frakke (transl: Your Old, Blue Coat).

Unrelated to that CD, there's another Danish cover of a Cohen song that I just gotta share while we're at it. Laura Mo's cover of Chelsea Hotel #2, sounds like this. Hjallerup Kro, the title, is a reference to an inn in a very small, provincial town in Denmark. I heard her perform this live back when she'd just written it and it was the best number of the night. She is an incredible singer.