Ejercicio Grupo A - 2 · Inglés PAU Canarias Julio 2022

GRUPO A

Ballet dancer, Darcey Bussell, warns teens that social media is an unkind space

A ballet that conveys a powerful message to young people to “be yourself”, while criticising social media in a story about superficial beauty, has inspired one of the UK’s most famous dancers to perform on the big screen.

Dame Darcey Bussell, a former principal of the Royal Ballet, will dance in a new film based on the classic ballet Coppelia because, she said, it will “resonate” with young people who face intense pressure to change their looks in the pursuit of happiness.

Coppelia is a modern interpretation of the 1870 comic ballet, an innovative approach that mixes 2D and computer-generated animation with live-action dance. Its producers describe it as a silent movie, using only the language of dance, music and animation to tell the story.

In the original story, Dr Coppelius is an eccentric toymaker who dreams of bringing his mechanical dolls to life. In the reimagined story, a young woman must save her sweetheart from having his heart used by the charismatic but sinister cosmetic surgeon Doctor Coppelius to bring life to Coppelia, the perfect robot-woman he has created.

Bussell said: “It’s about appreciating you can be yourself, and you should be happy with who you are. The young, especially, believe that to be happy they have to change their appearance.”

She is disturbed by the darker side of social media, describing it as “an unkind space”. “For all the good it creates in connecting people, it can also be the opposite. It’s a very hard thing to balance, for the young person especially, because they’ve known nothing else.

“Sadly, because we communicate constantly on a screen, we forget body language and how we read people’s emotions. When you’re constantly texting, it stops that very important social skill you learn from a young age.”

She said she only uses social media for work-related subjects, realising that the brevity of comments is the reason why they are so often misunderstood: “There’s no detail. You don’t see the thought behind it.”

One of the film’s producers said that it criticises social media by showing characters looking in the mirror after their treatment at the cosmetic clinic: “In the reflection, what they see is like an Instagram or Snapchat filter, a Kardashian-esque version of themselves. The directors wanted to show how people often want to see themselves. Kids are using these filters to give themselves perfect skin, bigger eyes, bigger lips, a smaller nose, whatever. It’s a terrible negative thing.”

Fragment adapted from The Guardian, February 2022

2. ANSWER the questions below. COPY no more than 10 words and/or a number from the text to answer each question. (1.5 points)

a)

b)

c)