My premier in Abu Dhabi as Golden Idol
by Istvan Simon, dancer of Semperoper Ballett

Istvan Simon

Indiana Jones and the Golden Idol (unfortunately this time Indy was not coming with us)

In the morning it was quite hard to wake up because the stage rehearsal finished quite late the day before and after I needed to change room in the hotel. The hotel’s breakfast was excellent. Some of my colleagues woke up very early to go for a camel ride in the desert.

Ana Presta

On the class I was trying to place my body and prepare to be able to jump and get my strength back. It was going well, it is always fun to do class on stage, big auditorium inspires me. 

Class on the stage: Sang-Eun Lee, Arika Togawa, István Simon, Vitaly Fadeev and the company (photo by Mykola Abramenko)

Emirates Palace's theater auditorium

After class I went through a few spacing details and I tried some jumps and turns from my Golden Idol variation. Doing the ending trick I scraped the wound again on my arch. This is a very common bruise that dancers get doing turns or jumps finishing to the knee. So I had to go quickly to the pharmacy in Marina Mall to get some sterile wound dressing.

It was nothing serious like this I only needed a plaster

I ordered a nice lunch from the hotel’s room service and I took an afternoon nap like I always do before a show. We had a warm-up class, everybody was very excited about the premier. I had a nice massage and I began to wait since my solo is only in the third act. Many people were going through steps on the hall way, putting make-up on, fixing the costumes on themselves. The performance started. I planned everything carefully: how to spend my time to be in the best condition when I have to perform on stage. I waited until the beginning of 1^st act 3^rd scene and then I did a series of bar exercises on my own to keep my muscles ready and prepared. The 25 minutes body paint followed. The make-up department uses a sticky yellow paint then they put sparkly golden glitter on top of it to have the shiny effect. 

My foot with wound dressing, painted gold

While walking, jumping, warming up some of the glitters fall down and everything I touched turned into gold.  My colleagues were not too happy when they found some gold on their clothes, costumes, carpet, shower...

There is a legend about King Midas: everything he touched turned into gold and he almost died of hunger

Luckily we had an extra break before the last scene to change the sets so I had enough time to warm up properly. The dancing went well, the whole evening was a big success, standing ovation and meeting with the VIP guest followed. Everyone was happy and relieved after the hard work.

In the end of the day