Swan Lake
American Ballet Theatre, London Coliseum
A complex, somewhat troubled history has turned Swan Lake into the most manipulated ballet ever. The lack of strict historical constraints has frequently led ballet directors, repetiteurs and choreographers to feel more or less free to intervene in the text, often twisting its narrative and altering the traditional, though not original, choreography. Take, for instance, Kevin McKenzie’s production for American Ballet Theatre, which strives to make the most of the ballet’s performance tradition while at the same time peppering the work with not so stylistically and dramaturgically appropriate additions.
In line with other and historically more famous versions, this one also uses the overture’s yearning notes for a rather superfluous prologue, in which we see Princess Odette fall victim to Rothbart’s evil spell and become a swan — assuming that ridiculously fluffy and lifeless thing in the hands of the evil magician was a swan.
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