2 Ballerinas for Oddette-Odile part ???

[Guest Amy_Dance]

Hi everyone!!!

I have been reading a bit about Odile and Odette from the Swan Lake and I am a little confused if it is right to have the same ballerina making both parts .I do not remember very well but it was used to use one for Odette and another for Odile but the name of teh second should never appear at the programs. Is this right? If not I would really appreciate if someone could clarify this.

THANKS A LOT!!!

[Mel Johnson]

Amy, the plot point of having Odette/Odile be a dual role is that von Rothbart changes his own daughter, Odile into the very face and form of Odette, so to deceive Siegfried; sort of an evil twin. Unless one has identical twin ballerinas, one lyric and the other dramatic, this point would be lost if Odette and Odile don't look exactly alike except for the dress. In one production I remember, before the Act III curtain, she turned back into a sort of slimy salamander before exiting!

[Estelle]

Also, in some productions, there is another dancer playing Odette, but just for a few seconds at the end of act III: when Odile finally succeeds at seducing Siegfried and he asks to marry her, suddenly one can see very briefly poor Odette in the background, and Siegfried realizes that he's done a very, very big mistake. I saw it in Bourmeister's production (danced by the POB), Odette appears just briefly behind a sort of half-transparent curtain, so one can just recognize her costume (white tutu) and her characteristic swan-like hand movements. Of course, then it is another dancer, since the dancer dancing Odette in the rest of the ballet is on stage dancing Odile. But it is so brief that just choosing a dancer of similar height and build is enough...

[Guest Amy_Dance]

Thanks a lot Estelle !! I saw it like that and was a little bit confused in that sense .

[coda]

In fact, there was a production where two different ballerinas danced Odette (Acts 2 and 4 as they were at that time) and Odile (Act 3). It happened in 1938, when Agrippina Vaganova choreographed for the Kirov Ballet her version of "Swan Lake" with Galina Ulanova as Odette and Olga Iordan as Odile, both pefectly suitable for those roles be the nature of their talent. However, Ulanova herself was not satisfied with this limitation of her presence in this ballet and later, in 1940s, when she already was with the Bolshoi, danced both Odette and Odile (as she did at the beginning of her career in 1929).