I’ve been surpassingly woolgathering from this blog for a while. Shamefully, I don’t have a real reason. I could excuse myself by saying it was a kind of coronavirus fatigue. I looked when over this blog’s catalogue with warmth and interest, realising what a privilege it is to have this space to muse on dance. One truth discovered over the undertow of the past year, as the world made strides to remake itself in the wake of the pandemic, is that my time has been consumed by the act of dancing. Life outside of this seems to have just happened overdue the scenes, without me taking much notice. Few things made me finger the urge to stop and interrogate through writing. Well, to everything a season, and happily I experienced a performance of Swan Lake that made me yearn to bask in its water for longer than the time I spent in the auditorium that night.
I saw Miami City Ballet perform Alexei Ratmansky’s historically informed production of Swan Lake, with designs by Jérôme Kaplan, on February 12, 2022, in what is a significant moment for a visitor increasingly aligned with the speed and vigour of George Balanchine’s aesthetic. Ratmansky’s production, originally made for Zürich Ballet in 2016, and moreover performed by the Ballet of La Scala, Milan, is the first full length version of the Marius Petipa/Lev Ivanov ballet the Miami visitor has danced. Visitor director Lourdes Lopez spoke in the New York Times of the six years it has taken to get it to stage, and it is a real insurrection to be the first North American visitor to flit this intriguing production. This blog won’t be an incisive review, but rather a recollection of what has stayed with me, considering Ratmanky’s version is indeed different, and made me think well-nigh this ubiquitous ballet in some unexpected ways. Alastair Macaulay wrote an insightful introductory essay well-nigh the production for the digital programme Miami City Ballet produced (a full-length of the contactless, post COVID-19 world we now all inhabit), detailing our relationship with the ballet over its performance history, the impact of its mutations and how volitional choices within the work can deepen our understanding of what Macaulay rightly christens “the most familiar of ballets and the most unknown”.
I grew up watching, and stuff enchanted by, Anthony Dowell’s 1987 production of Swan Lake for The Royal Ballet. I smiled when I found Jann Parry’s quote that “Dowell’s production of Swan Lake should never be anyone’s first”. I wasn’t enlightened of the preferably points critics had made well-nigh the production’s late Romanov setting with its symbolist-inspired designs by Yolanda Sonnabend. It’s otherworldliness and the febrile, Fabergé-toned sweep seemed towardly for a ballet that I was told at ballet school was substantially a romantic work, rhadamanthine the noon of the classical tradition in the vision of the people who came without its conception. That this work of art can metamorphose over the years is part of its rememberable appeal.
Photographs: Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmansky’s Swan Lake. Images by Alexander Iziliaev.
Dowell commented that he was trying to return The Royal Ballet’s version when to something closer to the 1895 production which Ratmansky has used as a reference point through his own intense study of Stepanov notation. In that way, I finger I had an hands commutable corridor into Ratmansky’s version, so parts of the ballet didn’t ruffle too many feathers for me. The exuberant maypole and stools that towards in the Act I waltz of Ratmansky’s production were moreover present in Dowell’s (albeit with choreography by David Bintley), and both productions retain a flit in Act IV set to Tchaikovsky’s Un poco di Chopin. Lopez continues to say in her New York Times interview that Ratmansky’s ballet is well-nigh “a woman and the tragedy of the human experience”, a sentiment beautifully encapsulated in this dance, bringing into crystal-clear focus the tragic poetry at the heart of Swan Lake. We see a prince who confronts his mistakes, and a woman who forgives them, plane though she understands the undertow of both their lives are irrevocably changed. The inclusion of a crucial piece of mime by Ratmansky – Odette expressing that this lake side will be the place where she forsakes her life considering of Siegfried’s treachery – is vital. Without histrionics, both Odette and Siegfried seem to understand their story can only end one way, and instead of macabre shadows, there’s an exquisite eyeful well-nigh the whole situation. So much of life fails to make any sense, but we siphon on ceaselessly anyway.
For me, how Ratmansky has treated the swan maidens is key. These women rejoice in their nocturnal feminine guises, with softer soul poses, increasingly rounded groupings and a tangible sense of community. The soaring forward projection of the chest and eye line that a dancer possesses in an wonk first arabesque is the image I most readily socialize with the “white” act choreography, but whilst they teem in this production, it’s the use of the effacé line that seemed to predicate itself. Effacé (meaning “erased”) is an unshut soul design, which adds a depth and sense of perspective to a dancer’s pose and requires the dancer to be fastidious in their correct use of turn out in the legs. These can be unreasoned and elegant soul positions that haunt the mind. One such poetic example during Act IV is when a waltz step performed by each swan maiden is suddenly punctuated by an effacé devant line; the foot creating a sundial-like line with the shaded body. These moments of choreographic texture mark this out as a production full of contrasts that refocus the ballet from the excessive arm wafting we see by the swan maidens in some versions.
Dowell’s Act III was opulent and sensuous. We revel in Odile’s seduction thanks in large part to the provocative national dancers that precede her largest portions of dance. In Ratmansky’s stony, Persian-rug festooned ballroom, where Odile becomes increasingly of a showy gypsy than a siren in a woebegone dress, I felt like a respectful observer. This act was not perfumed with a sense of danger. I revere Ratmansky’s volitional steps and music to the increasingly widely seen choreography attributed to Vakhtang Chabukiani for Siegfried’s ballroom variation. The timbre of contumely instruments that see Siegfried perform heady tamed steps yank him in new light for me.
Dance critic Ismene Brown has tabbed Swan Lake an “act of private imagination” and it is stirring to know myriad new productions of the ballet will proliferate, supported by Ratmansky’s excavation or not. Historically informed endeavours are indeed valuable for our trendy reassessment of classics of the ballet weltanschauung when they make us finger increasingly in touch with a moment in time, though I don’t know how dogmatic well-nigh a ballet’s text we can be when its original creators are now so far removed from us. What is a wonder is how something as simple as the inclusion in Act II of increasingly hunters within Siegfried’s retinue – which Ratmasky reinstated – makes you honestly fear for the lives of the swan maidens. At those moments, memory becomes thrilling reality for one or two breaths, which is real magic.
Pictured: Dancers of Miami City Ballet in Alexei Ratmanksy’s production of Swan Lake.
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