Lin Bing, one of the show's organizers, described the void as a melancholy reference to the plight of Mr. Ai, who has now spent two months in police custody and is accused of economic crimes.
The soundtrack is clever: unobvious period hits (Donovan, singing "Hurdy Gurdy Man", gains a sinister resonance that can only work in its favour) and sly classical references (that melancholy trumpet solo popping up from time to time is Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question").
But Ratmansky's 2008 ballet also feels like a highly personal response to his native Russia, fleetingly and vividly coloured by Slavic melancholy, bright Soviet bombast and glancing references to Russian ballet history.
Hence the deep attention he pays to such things as the provenance of illustrative quotations, the number of up-to-date science references, the emphasis on melancholy which runs through the whole enterprise, and its philosophical range.
My character was melancholy.
And Mr. Leigh's work is quintessentially English, both in its cultural references and in its abiding melancholy, however comic.
Making references to "a happy yet melancholy" doll, he painted the lips naked and applied opaque white cream around the eyes to "basically double the eyeball size for a weird, extra-round effect.
Some of the pleasures of the film, directed by Eugène Green, are undeniably touristic, but this is tourism of an especially exalted kind, saturated with literary and historical references and infused with a melancholy intensity that is both seductive and strange.
Now 72, Ms. Farrell has just released her most lavish collection of standards, "It's Over" (Reference Recordings), featuring a dozen melancholy ballads.
The mood of the WA is summed up in Schelling's reference to the "veil of melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life" (SW I/7, p. 399).
