The Many Dreams of Swan Lake
Tracing the transformations of Swan Lake throughout popular culture – from Dracula to Princess Diana, The Red Shoes to lilac unicorns – for The Australian Ballet and Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake.
It’s widely lamented that Tchaikovsky didn’t live long enough to see the full success of Swan Lake, but one has to wonder what he might have made of the many variations introduced to his ballet over its hundreds of different productions around the globe: performed with an all-male cast, staged as a ballet within a ballet, or recast as a Freudian drama. For many, Swan Lake and ballet are synonymous, and once you begin to look for its influence throughout popular culture there are dozens of examples from both high art and low. Classic vampires, political machinations and talking unicorns have all arisen from artists calling on Swan Lake to invoke particular moods, themes or traditions in ways that Tchaikovsky could never have dreamed.
Adam Bull & Amber Scott in Graeme Murphy's Swan Lake. Photography Jim McFarlane.
There’s an enjoyable irony in remarking that the initial production of Swan Lake in 1877 had something of a lacklustre reception – the music called ‘undanceable’; the conductor claiming it to be ‘too complex’ – but it was hardly a full-blown disaster. The lack of eyewitness accounts of this production means that many elements thought of as belonging to the original are actually remnants of the 1895 St Petersburg production created by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, which cast such a long cultural shadow that it set the standard Swan Lake for decades to come. The original storyline is hazily familiar to all: Odette as the spellbound princess, turned into a white swan, requiring true love to be transformed back to humanity; the deception of the evil magician Von Rothbart and his daughter, Odile; and the prince, Siegfried, fooled into pledging his love for the wrong swan, dooming Odette forever, leaving Siegfried and Odette to drown themselves in the lake, finally together in death.
Ongoing repetition of this relatively simple story by subsequent productions required that variations be introduced, large and small, as each sought to make their mark on the ballet. For example, Agrippina Vaganova’s 1933 production shifted the setting from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and gave the prized role of Odette/Odile – traditionally danced by a single ballerina – to two different performers. Rudolf Nureyev’s performance as Siegfried in the 1963 Stuttgart Ballet was enough to inspire new interest in the often overlooked character of Prince Siegfried. Erik Bruhn’s version, three years later, combined the evil magician Von Rothbart with Siegfried’s mother, creating more than a little Freudian ickiness.
Graeme Murphy’s production, first staged by the Australian Ballet in 2002, made significant variations of its own. Most notably, Von Rothbart and Odile were combined into the new figure of The Baroness, a powerful female to better draw out the drama of Odette and Siegfried’s tortured romance. Murphy too adjusted the setting, this time to an Edwardian court. The echoes of the infamous Charles/Diana/Camilla love triangle, endlessly played out across the covers of supermarket tabloids, were obvious.
Other than the less successful Diana The Princess by Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss – which attempted to avoid kitsch while still including comically-stiff royals, music from 1980s gothic favourites The Cure, and Charles and Camilla using a riding crop as foreplay – it was Matthew Bourne’s 1995 production that next took on the British Royal Family as Swan Lake subtext. This contemporary retelling was perhaps the first to include both a palace and a nightclub, highlighting politics alongside the more transgressive and erotic elements. The new sexual politics introduced by its all-male cast made it a sensation.
Choreographed in 1987, Matz Ek’s Swan Lake for the Cullberg Ballet also played with traditional gender roles, featuring male swans as well as female in its corps de ballet, with the skullcaps worn by the cast making them all somewhat androgynous. Its more experimental moments seem less shocking now, especially after Bourne’s version, but it combined a comic prodding of ballet conventions and a new psychological depth for Odette/Odile. Perhaps the most enlightening variation, however, is present in John Neumeier’s 1976 Illusions – Like ‘Swan Lake’ for the Hamburg Ballet. He reimagined Act Two into a dream sequence, as Prince Ludwig of Bavaria projects himself into the role of Siegfried. Neumeier rethought many ballet classics, inserting serious literary and religious themes into his choreography, but by allowing Ludwig to project himself into Swan Lake he acknowledges its cultural power within the staging itself.
If you ask a layman to picture a ballet, any ballet, it is inevitably Tchaikovsky that they will begin to hum. And sometimes, new variations in Swan Lake are actually just older elements returning. Murphy’s Swan Lake sought to restore as much of the original score as possible, as Tchaikovsky’s score was quickly spliced and mutated after its initial presentation. Even detached from the ballet, though, the score carries other cultural memories. Lovers of classic horror will recognise it as the music that plays over the opening credits of the Universal Pictures 1931 adaptation of Dracula, featuring Béla Lugosi in the role that made him famous. There is barely any soundtrack throughout the film, leaving Tchaikovsky to hang in the air long after his composition has ceased to play. It’s only fitting. Dracula’s tortured romance and supernatural transformations suit the darker elements of Swan Lake perfectly.
The ballet itself has also been featured in silent cinema. Carl Dreyer inserted Swan Lake into his tragic romance and landmark film for gay cinema, 1924′s Michael. The original novel by author Herman Bang shows its young artist and alluring princess watching a contemporary theatre piece; Dreyer replaces it with a performance of Swan Lake to better foreground the looming themes of sexual betrayal. And how could it not feature in perhaps the most famous ballet film of all time? Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes from 1948 has its beautiful protégé-to-be first discovered while dancing Swan Lake. There is simply no other work that would act as an appropriately fiendish test of her footwork.
The strangest cinematic adaptation is Barbie Of Swan Lake from 2003: a computer-generated fantasy piece filled with shiny, mechanical heroes and villains. Yes, Odette is transformed into swan by Von Rothbart, but he’s also been happily transforming others into adorable talking animals for comic relief. The transformative abilities of animation here are mostly prized for their instantaneous ability to place Barbie-slash-Odette into a sequence of impossibly dazzling gowns, to better sell dresses for her toy doppelganger. Although Barbie’s dance steps in this Swan Lake were created with motion-capture technology modelled on members of the New York City Ballet, it cannot capture their faces, of course; just their bodies.
Barbie might be pleased to know that Pierina Legnani’s performance as Odette/Odile in the classic 1895 production was described by one critic as embodying “the supreme ideal of plastic movement.” Legnani’s infamous thirty-two fouettés became an inescapable addition to any production of Swan Lake – even if they were only included as they were a trademark move that Legnani’s followers wanted to see her perform in every role. Swan Lake’s astonishing technical requirements are what make it contain such prized roles – Odette/Odile the most alluring for any dancer, requiring the portrayal of purity, grace, deception, sex, and more – but also what can make it a ‘plastic’ exhibition of skills, rather than heart.
Mark Helprin’s illustrated children’s novella Swan Lake keeps aspects of the folktales that inspired the ballet, but recasts the story into a historical account of diplomatic intrigue and social commentary. He writes with deft ambiguity about the supernatural aspects of the story: here, Von Rothbard is a power-hungry mortal, not a magician, and there’s plenty of logical wiggle-room to allow that the swan-transformation might just be the prince’s hallucination.
Graeme Murphy’s Swan Lake, like Helprin’s prose version, moves away from a literal interpretation of the ballet’s magical elements. The dream-world of swans is a soothing fantasy of Odette’s broken mind after she is committed to a sanatorium; perhaps finding a balance between the traditionally tragic ending and more Barbie-suitable happily ever afters, Murphy’s finale still contains Odette’s death, but symbolically implies a defeat of evil with its imagery of light and darkness. Most importantly, this Swan Lake was determined to move away from simply being a showcase of technical skill. By rediscovering the human qualities of its characters – love, betrayal, madness, tenderness – it resonates strongly with modern audiences, whether familiar with earlier versions and variations, or new to ballet altogether.
* * *