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ABT's "Swan Lake" -- traditional version?


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I just read John Rockwell's review of "'Swan Lake" in the NYTimes this morning and was puzzled by his lead:

"Swan Lake" is a - the - canonical ballet, and American Ballet Theater's staging, which began an 11-performance run last night at the Metropolitan Opera House, is a canonical production.

What that means is that no matter what the cast, and the dancers will shift dizzyingly throughout the run, ballet lovers can be assured of getting the real deal, reality being defined as earnest conservatism. Kevin McKenzie's version, now five years old, loyally follows the Petipa-Ivanov tradition and doesn't try to impose any breathtaking directorial conceits.

Have they changed the production this season?

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I think what Rockwell meant is that the British royal family doesn't figure in this production, there are no transgendered swans, and the locale has not been moved to the Great Salt Lake. He didn't care much for this performance but allows that a "canonical" production need not necessarily be dull.

I was struck by this, however: "As usual, the Ballet Theater orchestra sounded thin, and some solos ran into trouble." Goodness knows, we're used to criticism of the NYCB orchestra, but I'd never heard that thinness is a characteristic of the ABT orchestra.

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I would ditto everything that has been said in this thread about Rockwell's choice of words--though I'm too disheartened to be as witty in response.

In fact, I would not be (too) upset to hear this production described as "relatively conservative"--and I can even understand a critic wanting to reassure the ABT/Met. audience that they will see something that they will "recognize" as Swan Lake--but canonical? Canonical means, among other things, not only that the original structure, narrative, music, and choreography have been preserved (with--perhaps--a few caveats concerning widely accepted accretions or deletions that have been in place for decades). It also means that a production can be taken as a touchstone or basis for other productions' departures from the canon, and it implies that a production is widely accepted as such...Obviously, ABT's Swan Lake does not qualify.

I was pleased to see Rockwell covering the Bournonville festival and don't like jumping on the Times critic who has, in many respects, a tough job [sic] and is a sitting duck for fans etc.--but this isn't just a matter of disagreement. (One can disagree, say, on the quality of Mckenzie's choreography for some of the Act I dances that typically have to be re-done by whoever is staging the ballet. I think it's poor; someone else may think it does the job just fine--agree to disagree, blah, blah.) "Canonical" is just a bad misnomer for this production and even "earnestly" conservative" implies a production far more respectful of the tradition than this one...

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I'm quite perplexed as to why anyone would consider ABT's SL traditional. I thought it borderline modernistic at times and almost always adhering to contemporary tastes. But I'm even more perplexed by the description of the costumes as old-fashioned. Traditional, yes, but old-fashioned?

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V E R Y old fashioned. They have that musty, old medieval look that's so passe these days! :)

Even the most famous passages -- the White Swan adage in Act II and the Black Swan pdd -- have changes (small, but they're there) from the traditional version, ergo, as Leigh points out, this production is not canonical.

Where's David Blair when you need him? When you really, really need him :huh: ?

Have they changed the production this season?

According to a friend, a few bars from some of the Act III ethnic dances were cut. The dances didn't sound cut, so maybe he meant the action sequences with the princesses and their dancers. The dance for the Act I trio felt shorter, but maybe that's just because I enjoyed Herman so very much.

One thing that has bothered me since the premiere of this "canonical" staging is the reversal of who does the peasants' dancing and who does the aristocrats'. Despite its vague earthiness, the hoity-toities do the Waltz, and the peons do the regal-sounding mazurka.

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One thing that has bothered me since the premiere of this "canonical" staging is the reversal of who does the peasants' dancing and who does the aristocrats'.  Despite its vague earthiness, the hoity-toities do the Waltz, and the peons do the regal-sounding mazurka.

Please correct if I'm wrong, but didn't Ashton do it that way also?

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Rockwell seems not to know how astoundingly lurid and shocking McKenzies's version of Act 3 was to all of us who knew really traditional St Petersburg-derived versions of "Swan Lake." It's one of the bizarre things about his appointment -- holes seem to open up in his knowledge and just gape at us -- Alexandra, I could HEAR your jaw drop. "Canonic" it is not (not yet).

BUT..... for anybody who's seen the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet's venerable version of "Swan Lake," McKenzies's version will look VERY familiar, for he's stolen most of his original-seeming ideas from their production (notably, the compellingly dangerous sexy Act 3 von Rothbart), disguised them slightly to make the theft less obvious and also to exploit GOmes' virtuosity (which the Stanislavsky's can't match), without taking the Stnanislavsky's wonderful tall craggy sets (even the first act is set in a sunken garden, the Queen Mother enters down a flight of stairs up right), which set up the ultimate jump off the cliff and make it magnificently telling.

SO ABT's is in a sense more in the tradition than I would have ever thought -- a Moscow tradition. If the Stanislavsky hadn't come through SF a few years back and shaken us up pretty good -- for strange as it was, the Stanislasky's was NOT foolish, like Zefirelli's or messy (like parts of Makarova's), but a development in line with Gorsky's ways of making the Petipa ballets make more sense theatrically and psychologically, and that IS the Moscow tradition.

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Leigh, I wish to God i could remember it all in really accurate detail. To make these comparisons, it would be easier in a sense if I'd just been taking notes and cataloguing the similarities -- but I wasn't. I saw the Stanislavsky first, and then ABT's quite soon after -- I remember talking about the similarities with George Jackson, who had also been struck by some resemblances, I believe, which makes me more confident.

I also wish that everybody could see the Moscow/Stanislavsky version, which I really admire. Lots of theater/ballet people in SF saw it and felt the same -- it was staged in a small, Broadway-style house, like the Golden Gate Theater (where by the way, the Moscow Classical ballet had appeared fifteen years ago, our first sight of both Maximova and Malakhov).

The Moscow/Stanislavsky version is really intelligent dramatically -- rather old-fashioned in terms of steps, a pas de quatre in the first act that made me feel like I'd been sucking on violet pastilles -- but it streamlines the action in a way that makes real theater sense -- like those high walls, they create a claustrophobic atmosphere that heightens the momentousness of everything, make you feel the kingdom NEEDS an heir, and make it seem likely that someone’s going to do something precipitate (“far un precipizio,” as the y say in Italian opera).

And Act 3 is lurid in the extreme -- ABT's is actually less so -- Odile is almost a hallucination -- which is kinda cheesily effected by von ROthbart's enormous red cloak. In the Spanish dance, the lead female dancer disappears behind vB's cloak, the Prince looks bewildered, then Odile steps out as if she WERE the Spanish dancer and then disappears behind the cloak and things are "back to normal" -- IF I REMEMBER THIS RIGHT, it was hallucinatory to me and I wondered IF I HAD seen it myself! And doesn't Gomes get particularly into the act in the Spanish segment?

I wouldn't be surprised if McKenzie owed something to Bourne's version – I hadn't thought ot THAT. Yeah, the prince is passive and bewildered in those versions. ABT's version turns lots of the Stanislavsky vB's charlatanry hypnotic-command into dance-command-- an arabesque balance held for like 8 counts in utter stillness, and girls swooning to DANCE with Gomes.... that the Stanislavsky kept in the form of mime. ABT's ends up feeling more decorative, less primal -- thought the technique on display is amazing, it doesn't translate into making you BELIEVE in von B's power (as he technique on display in la Sylphide makes you believe that the Sylph is mildly supernatural) but you just feel ABT's stumbled on a real clever pretext....

My feeling is that the Stanislavsky has greater integrity....

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I saw the Moscow/Stanislavsky Ballet's version a few years ago and admired the company very much. I didn't care for the ballet -- in the fashion of the Soviet era, it excised every bit of Petipa and substituted new dances. The next year I saw, for the first time, the old Bourmeister production, which did the same thing and had other similarities -- no mime, no Petipa, an updating, for its time.

And then, working backward, I realized that the "radical" additions by Nureyev, and later, Grigorovich, weren't really radical at all, but descended from this production which is, after all, what they grew up with.

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I too was quite struck by Rockwell's idea that this is a traditional version! I think that is one more reason why it is important for major ballet companies to try to keep to the story--if this is a traditional one, what on earth is a new one! I remember Christopher Wheeldon being interviewed about his (perfectly awful) version of Swan Lake for Pennsylvania saying that his basis was the (also quite bad) version that the Royal Ballet now does (how can you really take seriously a 19th century prince who hunts with a crossbow?), and his saying that Rothbart as an owl never made sense to him. To me that is just an amazing lack of imagination--how hard is it to figure out how ominous and frightening and powerful an owl's cry must have sounded to someone in a forest at night. Rothbart isn't sexy, he is the embodiment of an irrational evil, tricking Siegfried with Odile and by implication, a study of basic human powerlessness and the ultimate triumph of love (though not on this earth).

ABT's version has none of this. It isn't medieval, it is early Renaissance, which is a very different period, one in which human thought and reason could triumph--a very different feeling than the lush romanticism of the music. ABT's court is a joke--peasants sit while nobles stand, they dance together, the Queen has no court, the nobles dance around the Maypole (a peasant custom if there ever was one.) Siegfried isn't looking for his soul mate, he seems to be looking for a hookup. All the jumping in the world won't give him the character that the traditional, more static and noble Siegfried has. ABT doesn't even give him the wonderful final scene in the first act, where he rushes off an empty stage to his destiny.

The prologue is absurd, and destroys the wonderful entrance Petipa and Tchaikovsky developed for Odette, when Siegfried prepares us for the most beautiful and mysterious creature on earth. We have already seen her wondering around in her nightgown, something no princess would ever do. And the third act--I have gone on and on about that before! Rothbart isn't seducing the court, and if he is, then presumably we are being told that sex=evil, while at the same time having it rubbed in our face like so much soft porn. There is no mystery, no beauty, and no poetry in this glitzy version (even the white act is danced in front of a moon the size of New Jersey). It is hard to believe that anyone with the smallest knowedge of ballet history could call this traditional.

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I too was quite struck by Rockwell's idea that this is a traditional version!  I think that is one more reason why it is important for major ballet companies to try to keep to the story--if this is a traditional one, what on earth is a new one!  I remember Christopher Wheeldon being interviewed about his (perfectly awful) version of Swan Lake for Pennsylvania saying that his basis was the (also quite bad) version that the Royal Ballet now does (how can you really take seriously a 19th century prince who hunts with a crossbow?), and his saying that Rothbart as an owl never made sense to him.  To me that is just an amazing lack of imagination--how hard is it to figure out how ominous and frightening and powerful an owl's cry must have sounded to someone in a forest at night.  Rothbart isn't sexy, he is the embodiment of an irrational evil, tricking Siegfried with Odile and by implication, a study of basic human powerlessness and the ultimate triumph of love (though not on this earth). 

In defense of Wheeldon's new version of Swan Lake, I saw it as extremely imaginative and inventive. It takes you in different directions than the traditional SL's that is for sure. So I do not see it as "perfectly awful" IMO. The choreography for the corps of swans is amazing and fresh.

The opening scene in the ballet studio that changes before your eyes to the lakeside ( and into Sigfried's imagination) was incredibly powerful. This is definitely not for traditionalists I suppose. But it did possess a powerful theatricality and succeeded on its own terms.

ABT's version tries to be traditional and misses the mark as many here have mentioned. But for me, its biggest disappointment is its lack of passion and inspiration which is one of the main reasons for returning to any SL. I would take Wheeldon's SL over ABT's version any day because of this, even though it is a non traditional rendering.

My favorite traditional SL is the Kirov's. It just seems to be in their blood.........the passion, the technique, and production values.

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