Over this summer you can see Swan Lake performed at the Royal Opera House by the Royal Ballet; at the Coliseum by a company from Georgia; at Sadler’s Wells by Chinese acrobats; and at the Royal Albert Hall by English National Ballet. It is expected therefore to attract audiences of Taylor Swiftian magnitude – well in excess of 100,000, by my very rough reckoning. And should you dread autumnal withdrawal symptoms, then fear not: a film of Matthew Bourne’s version will be shown in cinemas in September, prior to a national live tour starting in November and continuing until May, including a two-month season at Sadler’s Wells over Christmas.
There isn’t a hint of Magic Mike erotic tease about this: we never see any genitals
What is the basis of this ballet’s appeal, which seems to have grown over the last century to the point at which it has become for many the art form’s defining image, as well as fail-safe at the box office? It’s certainly not a flawless masterpiece. However it is framed or trimmed, the plot is an absurd muddle, full of unanswered questions and gaping holes. How, for starters, to explain the motivation or nature of Baron Von Rothbart: why does he turn himself into an owl after dark, and why has he got it in for Odette? It is Tchaikovsky’s score with its palpitating themes and thunderous cadences that holds it all together, along with the poetry of the first lakeside act that preserves what survives of Lev Ivanov’s 1895 choreography. Dump the rest and nothing of great aesthetic or historic value would be lost, as Balanchine realised when he presented his Swan Lake in truncated form.
English National Ballet has revived Derek Deane’s staging, designed to fill the Albert Hall’s arena floor and now getting on for 30 years old. It does the business efficiently, though it scarcely addresses the story’s more poetic resonances – its conception of a winged Rothbart is simply pantomime ludicrous and the scale of the production is too large for any intimacy or nuance of feeling to register. Its best feature is its imaginative use of an expanded corps, firmly drilled and kaleidoscopically circulated: the 60 swans move as one flight, in gracefully shaped symmetries, and the peasant merry-making goes with a swing. Making their debuts as Siegfried and Odette-Odile, Aitor Arrieta and Emma Hawes give technically elegant performances devoid as yet of any intensity of characterisation. Too much dry ice floods the lakeside scenes. ENB’s orchestra plays with gusto under Maria Seletskaja. The vacuous programme is a total rip-off at £12: avoid.
Now based in France, Nadia Beugré hails from the Ivory Coast and her L’Homme rare grows out of west African street dance, ‘rare’ in this context implying, I guess, raw or saignant rather than infrequent. Five men – three black, two white – jive down the aisles and invite members of the audience to join them. On stage they proceed to strip each other naked and prance aimlessly around with their backs to us, amid much chanting in an indeterminate patois. There isn’t a hint of Magic Mike erotic tease about this: we never see any genitals. The mood is hilarious and joyous, a homosocial locker-room romp in which the men shimmy and gyrate, stand on their heads, slap each other’s buttocks and play around with white sheets.
The sting in the tail is the last-moment appearance of Beugré, playing a melancholy mouth organ. Her body is not her friend. Hunched and halting as though in pain or fear of being whipped, she is solitary, vulnerable and ignored, her nakedness a source of shame and oppression. Men have all the fun.
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