Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until he agreed to do a new Swan Lake is difficult to understand given the meh results. Dawson is a polite, undemonstrative choreographer, and his lack of enthusiasm has rather predictably produced an asthenic result.
Obviously, abandon thoughts of white swans, or royalty, or Matthew Bourne’s brilliant, vaudevillian 1995 rewrite. This is, literally, a grey production in every way — or rather greyed-out, as if it were the ghost of something that was functional but is now impotent. Dawson doesn’t display the theatrical or choreographic skills here that would have made that disabling of older functions (enchantment, technique, musicality) a deliberate, interesting choice.
The grey setting shows a lattice of crashed girders, with a minimalist dish of white light representing the lake, designed by John Otto. The party scenes look like a cheerless staff do in the backrooms of a posh hotel, men in grey jackets and black trousers, women in frumpy midi-dresses, rhubarbing generically.
The story is mumbled rather than explored: moody no-mates Siegfried mooching next to his Tiggerish friend Benno, who gets the lion’s share of the dancing at first, but nothing emerges of the crucial sexual subtext.
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