Sheer magic

For 100 years, ballet has been represented by the image of a ballerina with a feathered headdress and an arm raised as a quivering wing. Then, in 1995, came Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and ballet’s icon lost its long-held supremacy. The Swan Princess met her masculine match: a bare-torsoed, bare-footed, muscled Adonis in feathery trousers. Never before, in ballet history, had the revisitation of a well-known work acquired the same iconic status as its predecessor.

Almost ten years down the line, Bourne’s Swan Lake is still splendidly engaging. Central to it remains the amazing transformation of the traditional tutu-ed ladies into now fiery, now subtly ambiguous guys. Although the original surprise has waned, the choreographic ideas conceived for the male swans have not lost their impact. Bourne’s ‘swans’ scenes can be numbered among other legendary moments in theatre-dance history, for they stand out for their choreographic inventiveness, dramatic drive and visual appeal.

Most popular

Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

Indeed, some editing has occurred here and there. And, inevitably, the new cast proposes a reading different from the one known by those who have seen the commercially available video or by those who have seen previous runs of the work. In each instance, the changes are for the better. The Prince’s drama now comes across more fully than ever, generating vibrantly effective narrative tensions between the man’s fight against an unresponsive, etiquette-abiding and socially constraining world, and more light-hearted situations dominated by delectable jokes on the royal family and succulently camp balletic parody.

Similarly, the relationship between the Prince and the Swan is intriguingly more ambiguous than before. The luscious homoerotic lyricism that underscored the Swan’s movement vocabulary in the original production, and which led to the fairly arbitrary label of ‘gay ballet’, has now been replaced by a more fierce, almost feral approach to the choreography.