There’s been heated disagreement over the past week about what’s right and wrong. Is the rocket-propelled ex-Bolshoi enfant terrible Ivan Vasiliev ‘right’ for Swan Lake? Is English National Ballet right to accept such huge thighs in this of all classics, when the sizeist cohorts of the Russian establishment always said nyet to the sturdy, forceful Belarussian? That peculiar balletic categorisation ‘emploi’ has been invoked even by British critics. Emploi means ‘rightness’ as a ‘type’ for a role. Emploi was what drove Mikhail Baryshnikov, another short man condemned at home by his build to demi-caractère parts, to quit Russia and its narrowmindedness and redefine himself as danseur noble in the West.
So when does concern for rectitude become narrowmindedness? The Vasiliev debate has echoes of comments 25 years ago when another Bolshoi superman with tremendous thighs, Irek Mukhamedov, joined the Royal Ballet pleading to explore the lyrical classics that he had been typecast away from. Mukhamedov became, in the long perspective of the FT’s critic Clement Crisp, the finest leading man in Giselle he had seen.
So why not cut Vasiliev some slack in his first-ever attempt at Prince Siegfried with ENB? Personally, I like some angst in a Siegfried now and again, so I took to his urgent performance, because he so evidently longed to become some other kind of dancer: in a reflection of the folktale itself, this muscleman wanted to fly, to become a swan, in a way.
The wren-sized Alina Cojocaru, as Odette-Odile, fluttering exquisitely amid ENB’s softly drilled swangirls on Peter Farmer’s picturesquely forbidding lakeside, brought out an urgent protectiveness in him. Even if he came on a bit strong, the ballet’s theme of this man betraying himself — fatally to his victim but also to himself — rang out.
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