The genius of Martha Graham

If eight weeks in lockdown have brought out my baser impulses (biscuits by the sleeve, total renunciation of waistbands), it’s also deepened my appetite for culture at its plushest, liveliest heights. It’s not just beaches and brunches I’m craving as spring turns to summer and I round off my second month of working supine on the couch; it’s the sheen of studio lights on the Rothkos at Tate Modern, the whooshing sound when a dancer catapults herself across the Sadler’s Wells stage. Fortunately, watching the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake on Marquee TV last week — the world’s favourite ballet by the world’s foremost company — went some way in filling that void.

Yuri Grigorovich’s 2001 production is performed to perfection here, with a consummate turn from prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. But the real triumph is the show’s faith in its own brilliance — the easy confidence of the choreography, the assertive grandeur of every set piece, from the fairy-tale castle (complete with a high-flying harlequin) to the moonlit lake where Prince Siegfried meets his Swan Queen. Even flashy character touches like the courtiers’ Lord Farquaad hairdos are paraded with aplomb.

Conviction matters in a narrative as fragmented as this one. There are a few departures from tradition in Grigorovich’s version: it takes place over two acts instead of four, and the prince’s role is expanded to the extent that his plight outshines Odette’s. This is down to a woolly psychological conceit that recasts the villain as an agent of fate and the lakeside as a figment of Siegfried’s imagination. The ensuing toggle between real life and fantasy would be more annoying if the dancing wasn’t so exceptional.

Zakharova and Denis Rodkin wear their leading roles like a second skin. The latter looks every inch the Disney prince as he doles out quadruple pirouettes, his golden locks flowing, while our heroine is lightweight and long-limbed, craning her neck in creaturely trepidation.