Kesatan Ballet

Been a while since my last post, and there are reasons for that. My laptop has been doing strange things, so I had to get that fixed. Plus, we've been very busy touring all the little islands that dot this planet. It's a very interesting place, no doubt. I saw that dance a little while ago, but it didn't tell me anything new. I took some notes so I could describe it:

Kesatan "ballets", as the yela'kaja called them, begin regularly at sunset in an outdoor theater above water with a single dancer, who the yela'kaja calls the Storyteller. (The Kesatan sign for him, I'm told, comes from a sign meaning "to tell" or "to teach".) He basically does a long dance that invokes some sort of water spirit and then sets up the whole story for us. This particular story follows a young Kesatan who witnessed the first contact with the Xala and went to warn the elders about it.

Before I go on, I need to tell you a little bit about this theater. You see, the whole building, which seems to be a combination of the dull metallic architecture of the Xala with the incorporation of some very artistic structures made of stone and some sort of coral that most definitely comes from the Kesatans, is built both above and below water. The audience is actually expected to follow the action both above and below water by circling around when it moves from one location to another. That, of course, means that there are actually very few seats in the entire building, and to get a good view you often have to jostle around in the crowd. Luckily, there weren't a whole lot of other land-dwellers watching, just a few Xala and a couple delegations from some other planets that I unfortunately don't know much about yet, one species that looked a bit like an upright-walking feathered lizard and some really pale creatures with some fuzzy hair and no visible eyes (they didn't go underwater as much, and I don't think they appreciated the play to much, either).

As you've probably guessed, the underwater section is separated between a truly underwater experience for the Kesatans and any other species that has gills and can deal with the Kesatan ocean, and an upper section that is protected by force-fields and pressurized for those of us who rely only on our lungs. I don't know how they keep the water clear as it is, as a lot of the underwater dances get pretty vigorous and involve quite a few performers.

I was very surprised by how well the show was done. I couldn't understand a single thing without my yela'kaja interpreter there beside me, but I did like some of the numbers. The only music in these dances comes from some various sizes of drums, all tuned specially so that they can be played with certain pitches in and out of water. I think there was actually one drum that was partially filled with water, and they'd turn it really quick to make a "thump" of water rushing from one end to the other.

Kesatans are good with costumes, too. Their Xala costumes were kind of artsy, but they definitely didn't look like the Kesatans inside them. For a while I wondered if there were Xala in the play, but they only "flew" in the underwater dances, so I really doubt it. There were also a lot of set pieces that I think are supposed to be Xala war machines, with lighting effects and some sounds from the drums. The yela'kaja actually showed me one afterward and showed me how it was made. All of the props are made from that coral material, with some metal plating and some dyes added where necessary. The lighting effects were the real interesting part. they use trained bio-luminescent fish that can actually swim out fast enough to look like an energy bolt firing at someone. The only thing the Xala provide for most of the props is the metal and some levitation crystals for easier transportation (which probably isn't all that necessary, as the coral stuff is pretty light underwater.

Anyway, as I said, the play followed a young, and probably fictional, Kesatan who saw the Xala coming and went to warn the elders, but they ignored him, thinking it was just a fantasy. Then it goes all the way up through the Xala civil war, showing mostly battles fought on Kesata, and a few on Jed, which seemed to be thousands of cloned Xala against a smaller number of the Je'e Edag group with some powerful bombs and weapons. Eventually the cloned Xala kill the leader of Je'e Edag and apparently annihilate or banish the rest of the group, liberating protecting the Kesatans from certain extinction. I figure the whole story has been pretty romanticized, but its still another view on it.

I can see that I've already got a really long post here, so I'll save a little bit about my little island-hopping here for the next one.