BRITNEY SPEARS - SPEARS' TROUBLED LIFE TURNED INTO DANCE PRODUCTION

The troubled life of BRITNEY SPEARS was turned into a ballet on Friday (01Feb08) for a one-off performance at a London music hall. The pop star's personal woes - which saw the singer being committed to Los Angeles' UCLA Medical Center on Thursday morning (31Jan08) to undergo psychiatric evaluation - have become the subject of a carefully choreographed 14-minute dance, titled Meltdown. The sequence at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was put together by choreographer Hubert Essakow for the Rambert Dance Company, and portrayed Spears' constant hounding by the paparazzi, including the moment she shaved off her blonde hair in February 2007. The production culminated in Spears' character being carried off stage on a stretcher - just like the singer herself was last month (Jan08) following her three-hour stand off with emergency services outside her Beverly Hills home. That incident, which was sparked when she refused to hand back her two young sons to ex-husband Kevin Federline's minder following a scheduled visit, resulted in her being taken to hospital in an ambulance for her first mental evaluation. Revealing the reason why he chose Spears as his dance topic, Essakow says, "(Her life is) a modern day tragedy. You can't open a newspaper without her being in it. I became obsessed by every detail of her life."