The 2010-11 season ballets

Poster for the ballet Ondine by The Royal Ballet in 2000

Ballets for the 2010 – 11 season: I was asked how I chose dancers for my small company and how I pick dancers for roles so I’ll write briefly about the process as well as the ballets we will be dancing this season. Dancers join my troupe knowing that we provide erotic ballet using the classical idiom. We screen for willingness to push the creative envelope so we don’t have a problem with squeamishness about having sexual encounters in front of an audience. This is Vegas and the competition for job openings is intense. We have never had a problem finding dancers with marvelous bodies and exquisite technique and in the current recession competition for a single opening is enormous. We have great health care benefits – We have to with unprotected sexual activity on stage. We are all screened with a full STI panel every two weeks so we are sometimes referred to as the Vampire Ballet because of the frequency of blood being drawn.

Every dancer is responsible for her own birth control and there are very few jobs for pregnant ballerinas (we are all tested weekly for hCG) so the girls are very careful to use their birth control correctly. Though the Ballet Mistress has Plan B One-step available for the asking if a girl thinks she may have had a birth control failure. The only contraceptive device we insist a female dancer wear during some performances is a diaphragm which is used as a gas guard (during underwater sex) to prevent water and air bubbles being forced into her uterus by the hydraulics of her partner’s thrusts while underwater. We have submerged sex in our version of the ballet Undine, the story of a water sprite that falls in love with a human.

I rotate dancers in roles to give new ones a chance to shine and get different interpretations of the same role since some high-rollers come to the show every night during their stay. Looks and technique are important, but ultimately it’s a about onstage chemistry so if couples work well together I’ll go with casting them, especially opposites in a ballet like Miss Julie where the guy is a sadist and the woman a masochist so there is really rough sex with the audience splattered with body fluids. They love it!

The ballets for this season are:

Undine: The set for our version of the ballet is a tidal pool by the sea. We are fortunate that in the five venues we dance in the buildings were reinforced either to take the weight of filled swimming pools on the upper floors or because the building had been designed to add more floors so that allows us to have a glass walled water filled pool to perform in.

The story comes from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novella Undine, popular in the 19th C. It is the tale of a water-nymph who marries a mortal. Similar to other 19th century fairy tales, the plot is based on man (Palemon) encountering the supernatural (the water nymph Ondine), but the outcome is rather different than many of the 19th century classics: here, it is the man that dies, and the female character survives. Ondine makes her first appearance from a fountain, shivering in the cold air. She meets the hero, Palemon, and is astonished when she feels his heartbeat as she doesn't possess a heart. Palemon deserts Berta, whom he has been courting, and decides to marry Ondine. During a particularly strong storm while at sea, Ondine is lost overboard. Palemon survives the shipwreck created by the angry Ondines and believing Ondine is lost ends up marrying Berta. Ondine returns and is heartbroken when she discovers Palemon's unfaithfulness. When she kisses him he dies and she goes back to the sea losing all memory of him forever.

In our version we have revised Sir Frederick Ashton’s 1958 ballet Ondine which he choreographed for the Royal Ballet. We have kept the original novella name, Undine, and changed the ending. So that after discovering his unfaithfulness, in place of the fatal kiss Undine has sex with him and her desire for him is so great that she sucks the life out of him as he orgasms inside her. She swims off holding hands with another female water sprite having found another partner before her male lover’s body is cold. The dancer/divers breathe from inconspicuous air hoses descending from a surface supply unit. The female lead’s long hair is worn loose and she wears only a Reflexions latex diaphragm and weighted pool-pointes to keep her slightly negatively buoyant with her weighted feet on the bottom of the pool. The ending has been hugely popular with audiences, especially straight Dommes and butch lesbians because Undine is one of the few ballets where a woman survives and triumphs.

The Image used at the top of this entry is of a poster for a production of the ballet Ondine by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, London in 2000. This poster features former Royal Ballet principal dancer Sarah Wildor, who danced the title role.

Swan Lake: We have a very popular ending to a shortened version of Swan Lake where Odette (the white swan) gives herself to Prince Siegfried who penetrates her from the rear while she is en pointe. The male dancer uses Cialis as a performance enhancer and she wears a thong bottom tutu and crotchless tights. The high-roller clubs all have intimate venues so the audience gets to watch up close and personal as the Prince shoot his wad inside her. There is an onstage costume change for Odette as his making love to her turns her back into an almost nude (she is still wearing pointe shoes) beautiful princess. Is it real? Yeah, it is, this is Vegas. The female usually doesn’t have time to orgasm, unless she has been masturbating backstage, but the male does and as he pulls out there are usually still strands of semen dripping from his fading erection as the couple takes their bows. It’s all great fun and the guys who lose heavily at the tables have their minds diverted for a while.

Miss Julie: A ballet in one act with choreography and libretto by Birgit Cullberg. Based on Johan August Strindberg’s famous stage play (first produced in 1889) about sex and class, the ballet tells the story of the aristocratic Miss Julie who seduces the family butler and has to pay for her indiscretion with her life. The main characters:

Miss Julie: Twenty-five-year old daughter of a count. She hates men, thanks to her mother’s influence on her, and believes her high social station makes her superior to her servants. Nevertheless, her instinctual female sexual urges drive her into the arms of a valet, Jean, who is all that she despises–a man and a lowly menial.

Jean: Thirty-year-old valet of the count. Though of the servant class, he is articulate and even can pepper his speech with French phrases he learned while working as a wine steward in Switzerland. He seems to represent the lower classes of the late 19th Century in a world that was casting off class distinctions and allowing the lowly to become equals of the high and the mighty. When Miss Julie entices him with her charms, he invites her to his room—and the boundaries separating social classes, and Miss Julie’s clothes, droop to the floor.

The servants talk about the incident that caused Miss Julie’s fiancé to breakup with her. Miss Julie was “training” her fiancé as a master would train his dog, forced him to jump over her horsewhip. Twice he did it and twice the whip cut him. When he was supposed to jump again, he took the whip from her, broke it into pieces, and walked off.

Miss Julie, on the rebound, seduces Jean and after they have been sexually intimate he tells her that the other servants know about their affair and they need to get away. Their plans fall through when Jean finds that she can’t finance their escape. They argue and Jean gets the better of her. Miss Julie becomes despondent and kills herself with the razor that Jean just finished shaving with.

We have revised the story line to include Miss Julie being brutally taken and having her cervix repeatedly rammed while she screams and squirms as the couple enjoys rough sex. There are also several wonderful S&M scenes with Miss Julie whipping Jean with her riding crop and them both enjoying it before he inseminates her on stage. Then after he refuses for a second time to go away with her she beats him with her riding crop again and then slits her wrists. The long sleeved riding habit she is wearing hides the bladders of fake blood that pour onto the stage as she runs the razor over her sleeves. S & M fetishists as well as misogynists love our version of Miss Julie for the beatings and the heroine’s suicide at the end.