The Prancing Puss – Ballet Meets Ragtime by Elizabeth Sparrow

#Ballet
#Ballerina
#Dancer
#ChronicIllness
#Housebound
#MillionsMissing

I've just realised I never shared this on here. It is a little performance I did last year, whilst in the process of building up enough strength for my 27th anniversary of M.E./tribute to #FreddieMercury, The Shoes Must Go On.

The music, this version produced by Marvin Hamlisch for The Sting and used here under the terms of Fair Use, for the purposes of entertainment and awareness of chronic illness, is a marvellous piece known, aptly, as The Entertainer. It was originally composed by ragtime legend Scott Joplin, and I associate it most with the nineties’ Felix cat food adverts. Yes, really.

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[Video Description: Filtered in black-and-white, Elizabeth is in the hallway, unobserved and therefore free to get up to mischief. Her hand claws low around a sideward doorway as the music begins, followed by her head. Her neck-length ruffled auburn hair is loose, her face is made up like a cat, and she is wearing a headband of fluffy cat ears, a tight black dress, black tights and pointe shoes. She looks mischievously at the camera, then up the stairs, then hides, only to emerge in an elegant crawl across the wooden floor. As the music continues, she flexibly stretches, washes and yawns like a cat, deliberately scratches the staircase carpet behind her, and soon discovers she has pointe shoes on. Surprised and delighted, she gradually stands in them, clawing gleefully at the door frame as she does so, and dances briefly en pointe, her hands curled before her like raised paws and feet bouncing lightly from step to step. As the music slows for its conclusion, she sinks to the floor, stretches, washes and yawns some more, and with a final satisfied scragging of the carpet, crawls elegantly back into hiding, only to fleetingly emerge with a shrug of eyebrows and a cheeky smile. A title card then reads:

‘I may not be able to dance en pointe for more than a few minutes every few months … but for those few precious minutes, my soul sings more than ever I do. Once a dancer, always a dancer.’

Elizabeth is then shown standing en pointe, arms curled up before her chest as before, and looking most disapprovingly at her own cat’s litter tray, to which she turns her back and kicks her feet in distaste, before waltzing into the kitchen with a flick of head, in no way whatsoever prepared to use such an unrefined convenience, now that she is a dancing cat.]