The dancing one-shot

[igenlode]

I've been having quite a bit of trouble with getting an ending for my 'dancing at the masquerade' story — not assisted, of course, by the inconvenient fact that Christine turns out not only to dance with Raoul before their little argument (It's an engagement, not a crime!) but actually gets lifted by him at that earlier stage, which was what I'd been intending to use as the grand climax of the 'dance'.

I eventually managed to fudge the issue about all the dancing sequences shown in my part of the narrative actually being repeats of stuff they've done already, although I can't really do much at this stage about the problem of things happening in my story that don't observably happen on stage — Christine and Raoul stop dancing and argue again at least once, for instance, whereas in the musical it's just one long chorus routine. But since with the exception of the separation and reunion with which I had decided to start the story it isn't even really a narrative ballet scene, it's a bit tricky to make a coherent conversation out of it as it stands.

Or at least that's my excuse. I'm sure I could in fact have written a conversation that didn't include the various break-off points and actions I've added, but having added these elaborations I didn't feel like disembowelling my story in a quest for authenticity to a dance sequence that apparently varies between different productions anyway :-p

(In the original sequence with Sarah Brightman and Steve Barton, Raoul appears to go off and talk to Mme Giry, which I haven't included at all.)

In any case, it's an awkward line to tread between the stylised performance we're seeing on stage, and what is actually supposed to be happening at that scene (a masked ball); in reality, all the guests wouldn't be lined up and doing group choreography, and it presumably wouldn't be that kind of chorus-line dancing being performed to the 'Masquerade' tune, but multiple ballroom numbers where everyone is paired off. So I've tried to hint at the onstage choreography in places while writing the narrative as a 'real' dance (complications, complications!)

The 'lift' sequence, when I reached it, felt very nondescript as an ending, so I tried to feel my way on beyond that to a more effective end and finished up with Raoul asking Christine again to make their engagement public and Christine changing her mind and deciding to do so. The trouble with that (it just came out of my subconscious as they were speaking) was that in canon she doesn't in fact announce their engagement at the masquerade; what actually happens is that an angry Phantom gatecrashes the affair a minute or so later. And while I was well aware of that and trying to write it 'ironically' (i.e. 'little does she know, but...') I wasn't at all convinced that this came across in the result. And I wasn't terribly happy with the way that whole conversation was written anyway -- it makes no sense that Christine's attitude keeps swinging round so much in the course of one short story.

So (spending about five days working on the last five hundred words) I ended up ditching that bit and writing a fresh dance interlude that tries —I hope— to indicate more clearly that Christine and Raoul have finished their little solo turn and the final massed chorus line is in play, which should help to cue people to the idea that the Phantom is about to make his entrance immediately after the end of the story. (Arguably I should have concluded on his entrance, but that wasn't any part of the original concept of Christine and Raoul's relationship being symbolised by their dance — and it makes the story darker than I wanted.)

And then I did my best to work it back round to the final lines of the 'engagement' version, so that I could include Christine's defiance of the Phantom as written there without needing to have any actual announcements involved :-p

We shall see. It's as finished as it's going to get by now, I think. But I shall need to go through and iron out some of the inevitably repetitious descriptions of the music/dancing; I did try to keep it varied as I was going, but since it took me a fortnight to write a couple of thousand words I'm bound to have reused stuff that I had forgotten about.

Provisional title: "Shall We Dance?" (doesn't fit all that well to the finished product, but it's what I had in mind as I was writing it) or just "Masquerade". No idea about a summary; what I need to say is basically something along the lines of Christine dances with Raoul and works out more about their relationship. But only very vaguely along those lines :-P