Rolling in the Deep: the video

The new hit single by Adele somehow escaped my notice until a few weeks ago. When I did finally hear it, I also checked out the video on Youtube, and was quite taken by it. I love the rooms filled with glass and ceramics (though they seem like a terrible waste!), but most of all the dancer in the room filled with sand caught my eye. Something about that room - the low ceiling, the harsh lighting, the sand - evokes a subterranean chamber. I was reminded of the mine shaft I visited last summer in Lansford, PA. The dancer herself, though, brings out a more savage and distant aspect of the scene. She is graceful and full of an inscrutable purpose, seemingly ready to bring down the walls and ceiling with her dance. I see Gagool, the "witch" in King Solomon's Mines, in her. She is something so earthy and distant from Adele's lament of love ill-spent that the video itself becomes more interesting than the shabbily "veiled" lyrics. The dancer joins with the beat of the drums to surpass the singer's polished wail.