Swan Lake is the itch choreographers cannot stop scratching. Parts of Hamlet aside, it may be the most instantly recognisable piece of theatre on earth, the “favourite” ballet of those who have never seen one, a money-spinning signature dish reheated and served so often that, for regular dance-goers, it can become more Boxing Day turkey than magic swan. For anyone inside dance, this iconic status is a problem, an irritant, an invitation to tinker. This is the immovable object everybody has to butt against, the timeless classic that makes revisionists of them all.
Graeme Murphy, whose version of Swan Lake is coming to the UK this month with Australian Ballet, says bluntly: “I’ve never seen a performance I’ve felt satisfied with. I don’t have one that sticks in my head as being wildly successful.” Christopher Wheeldon — British-born, American-based and just about the most feted young classical choreographer in the world — sounds just as disillusioned when he talks about his version, also coming to Britain when the Pennsylvania Ballet visits the Edinburgh festival next month: “I haven’t been lucky enough to see a production that really works for me.” Both men backtrack quickly and talk about “getting goose bumps” (Murphy) or “the epitome of poetic dance” (Wheeldon), but both sound deeply frustrated that, for them, the beauty of Swan Lake emerges only in isolated moments.
“I think the expectations are always so high,” says Murphy. “If it’s your first ballet, you are told it’s the big one. If you’ve seen a lot of dance, you go back to it almost as a benchmark, to see how you feel about that kind of dancing, often before moving on to something more challenging.” The problem with Swan Lake, he says, is “the abruptness with which the storytelling stops and the diversions begin. The story can be a great stumbling block. It’s difficult to take seriously. I wanted to make a Swan Lake the audience could bring its intelligence to, instead of having to check it in at the cloakroom”.
If the whole thing is so unsatisfactory, why do so many choreographers return to it? “If I was honest, I’d say it’s the score,” says Murphy. “The greatest thing about Swan Lake is the music, and the greatest battle for the choreo-graphy is to live up to it.”
Yet, if Swan Lake the ballet has been radically nipped and tucked over the years, Swan Lake the score was butchered from the off. Tchaikovsky was commissioned to write it in 1875 for the Bolshoi theatre, in Moscow, but as soon as he delivered it, the Austrian choreographer Wenzel Reisinger started making changes. Tchaikovsky’s sweeping dramatic structure was jettisoned and the music cut by a third, with the remainder shaped to support the ballet conventions of the day, which basically called for a series of party turns interspersed with processions. Dancers were encouraged to make up their own variations, using whatever extraneous tunes they liked. The result was condemned as baffling and boring, and quickly shelved.
It was only after the successes of Sleeping Beauty and the Nutcracker in St Petersburg, more than a decade later, that Swan Lake was considered worth reviving. A new version, with choreography by Petipa and Ivanov, premiered at the Mariinsky theatre in 1895. This is still considered the semisacred Ur-version, even though it is no longer presented in its pristine form anywhere, and the score was once again heavily edited. In any case, it wasn’t long before other Russian ballet masters and dancers were making their own amendments, variously updating the story from the age of chivalry to the Romantic era, adding a jester or putting in a happy ending.
The Swan Lake that the Kirov Ballet brings to the Royal Opera House this month is widely regarded as definitive, and often talked about as the Petipa/Ivanov version, but it is in fact a 1950 production by Konstantin Sergeyev, and contains elements added in 1901 by the Bolshoi’s Alexander Gorsky and in 1933 by the Mariinsky’s Agrippina Vaganova. But even Murphy concedes its power. “There’s something about the conviction of the Russians,” he says. “Their definition, their scale. I hate to see anything less than that, unless it’s a complete rethink. I want it all, or I want it fresh.”
For his Swan Lake, Murphy has jettisoned much of what we think we know about the ballet. The score is close to the one Tchaikovsky wrote, which means some famous passages seem to be in the wrong place. “It was ridi- culous,” says Murphy. “The most dramatic music, like the Russian dance, was being used for empty showpieces. Well, I’ve used it with the most dramatic moments.”
Instead of a tremulous part swan, part maiden, there is a naive but flesh-and-blood young woman, who is already betrothed to the prince when the ballet begins. There is no evil magician and no Odile, the dark counterpart to the swan princess; their place is taken by the prince’s worldly mistress. Inevitably, the production has been dubbed “the Princess Di Swan Lake”. Murphy acknowledges: “That was very deliberately our point of departure, but from there we didn’t stick to it slavishly, or we’d have a completely different ballet.” The princess is driven mad by discovering her husband ’s infidelity and the so-called white acts of the traditional ballet — the ones with the multitudes of swans — are enacted in her feverish imagination.
The presence of a strong older woman and the escape to an inner fantasy world are common themes in modern reworkings. The nonsense of the supernatural is replaced by the mumbo-jumbo of psychoanalysis, exemplified by Birdbrain, from Australian Dance Theatre, which “deconstructed” the ballet’s themes and techniques beyond the point of recognition. (Perhaps that’s why the dancers wore T-shirts bearing the names of their parts.) And we probably learn more than we want to about the kind of people who become choreographers from the Oedipal nature of most modern Swan Lakes. Even Matthew Bourne’s “male-centred” version is driven by a twisted mother-son dynamic.
Yet these concessions to modernity risk losing a vital element of the original. Stories of shape- shifting bird-women, tricked or rescued into marriage with a mortal man, exist throughout history. It is the very elusiveness of what they say about alienation and longing that makes them so powerful, a perfect fusion of meaning and form. Nail them to a rationale and doesn’t the magic vanish? Wheeldon would disagree. His ballet keeps much of the Petipa/Ivanov choreography but, inspired by Edgar Degas, begins in a studio where a company is rehearsing, naturally, Swan Lake. For the more fantastic scenes, it moves, like Murphy’s, into the mind of a protagonist, in this case the lead male dancer. “I’m just not so comfortable with fairy tales,” says Wheeldon. “But I think I’ve kept the magic; in fact, in many ways I think this approach offers more scope for that, because the imagination can go anywhere.”
Both men are clear they wanted to make, as Wheeldon says, “a production with a human element, not just a pretty stage picture”. And both decided they wanted to attract a fresh audience. This summer will reveal whether they have pulled off the even greater trick of making an established audience see with fresh eyes.
Australian Ballet, Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Wed-Sat, and Coliseum, WC2, July 20-24; Kirov Ballet, Royal Opera House, WC2, July 18-21; Pennsylvania Ballet, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Aug 15-19
