My ballet friend and I saw the Bolshoi Ballet’s live-streamed performance of Swan Lake on the 23rd. A couple of call-outs to the cast: Olga Smirnova danced the dual lead role of Odette/Odile; Jacopo Tissi danced Prince Siegfried; Egor Geraschenko danced the Evil Genius (more about this part later); and Alexei Putintsev danced The Fool. (Note: the excellent official site for the Bolshoi lists all the repertoire pieces with cast, etc., which is wonderful for nerds like me.)
About The Fool: this part has basically nothing to do with the plot, but the choreography for the part - and I have to assume it was, in this case, made to showcase this performer; it is both more modern and more original than anything else aside from a couple of brief passages with the Prince and the Evil Genius - was sensational. And Mr Putintsev was the absolute highlight of the production for me.
Swan Lake is of course staged to what may be the most famous ballet music ever written. Tchaikovsky’s symphonic masterpiece is stupendous, gorgeous, perfect music. The story of the ballet … eh, it’s kind of 19th-century. You have your princess-type girl, who has been enchanted (or cursed) to live as a swan at least half the time (for reasons which, in this production, are utterly obscure. More on that later). You have your sorcerer. You have your prince. Prince falls in love with swan girl. Sorcerer interferes by introducing a doppelganger. Prince chooses the wrong girl on the basis of enchantment/confusion/momentary excitement, and also apparent boredom with the available options, i.e. average everyday lovely princesses. The right girl, it is strongly implied, subsequently dies, leaving the Prince alone.
Now, my ballet friend informs me that in the ‘official’ story, Odette is turned into a swan because she says No to the wrong guy, namely the sorcerer (Evil Genius). I didn’t get that from what was on stage. A danced prologue would have helped A LOT.
The piece begins with the Prince being knighted. The movement here was very effective for the corps de ballet, sadly old-fashioned and passionless for the Prince. Mr. Tissi is certainly capable of a more robust performance, so I blame the choreography. (I know there are certain things the classical-ballet crowd wants to see from its premier danseurs. Those are different from the things I would like to see.) At any rate, after assorted courtly celebrations, the Prince somehow ends up at the lake where he meets and is beguiled by Odette. Evil Genius is hanging around, and I swear it seemed like he intentionally facilitated them falling in love. Which makes what happens next HELLA MADDENING.
Because in Act 2 Evil Genius severely f**ks them over. I mean SEVERELY. We’re back at court, watching a series of princesses dance to convince the Prince - who is not even present! - he should choose one of them for his bride. Eventually he shows up and there is a series of brief encounters. (These princesses and their cohorts were all charming. Costume and scenery splendid throughout, as usual.) Anyway then Evil Genius shows up, with Odile; everybody seems to assume she’s another eligible princess; and suddenly the Prince gets turned on.
A lot more could have been done with this. See above re: old-fashioned and passionless. However, it’s more or less a done deal, and only then does Evil Genius lift the veil so the Prince can see this is not, in fact, the swan girl he thought it was. We’ve seen the ‘marry the wrong girl’ thing before in Le Corsaire. There, it was played for laughs, and the victim was a bad guy anyway, and the ‘wrong girl’ really wanted to marry him and wasn’t there as someone else’s instrument of motiveless vengeance, and nobody died because of it. Anyway, moving on.
Here it is a real crime against the Prince, who is not a creep, as well as a vicious punishment of Odette (remember, we have no back story) ((and remember, from what we’ve seen, Evil Genius set the whole thing in motion so him being mad at her is so toxic and enraging I can’t even)).
The choreography demonstrates that Evil Genius is, at times, controlling the Prince’s actions and possibly his mind. But this is Really Mean Stuff, a level of malice we haven’t really seen before in one of these ballets, and to me without knowing his motivation it didn’t read properly as tragedy. The best villains are the ones we can understand. (Not the fault of the dancer. The dancer was great.) There is plenty of scope in the music for it, and plenty of time was spent very prettily on court dancing in Act 1, and on the corps of swans that could have been employed to bring forward the WHOLE REASON FOR THE TRAGEDY.
Anyway. I enjoyed the presentation despite these caveats. And I want someone to make a whole ballet for Alexei Putintsev as The Fool.
Before I close, let me turn to Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. I’ve seen it twice - once filmed, with the original cast, and once live here in L.A. very recently - and thought about it a lot. So have a couple of my fictional characters. Here is what Victor Garcia (an actor) has to say about it during an interview occurring in my upcoming novel UNMASKED:
“The whole first act is about this prince who is bored, stifled, lonely, desperate for love. He’s got this rejecting, controlling mother, and no father. He’s got this artificial court life with this tin-soldier part to play. He wants something but he doesn’t know what. He’s easy prey for the trashy girlfriend, and he doesn’t get that he’s being manipulated until he’s at the nightclub.”
“And that goes very wrong.”
“Very,” Victor agreed. “Andy says, and I think it’s true, the whole swan interlude should be taken literally. Magic realism, maybe. Swans are big, powerful animals. They can be dangerous. They’re territorial. They’re also faithful. They mate for life. They have flock friendships that can last for years. They are everything that the prince doesn’t have, plus they can fly. They can up and f**king leave. So he sees all that at a moment when he’s ready to jump, and he has this vision of what life could be. It’s a passionate vision. It’s gorgeous, and I think even when people shy away from the fact it’s men dancing intimately together, they can be moved by that.”
“And then there’s Act Three.”
“Oh my God, Act Three. … The prince has had his mind and heart opened. The Stranger comes in, and seduces everybody, including the Queen who is so cold to the prince. God, I hate her.”
“I hate her too.”
Victor smiled. “And the prince is seduced like all the others. He’s like, oh my God, that is what I want. No wonder I didn’t want that silly girl. No wonder it never worked. The dance they have together is the only really homoerotic part of the staging, and even after seeing it a bunch of times I’m not sure if it’s meant to be real life or the prince’s dream of what could be. Either way, it immediately crashes and burns because the Stranger rejects him. And this poor motherf**ker loses his mind. He was doomed from the beginning. The whole Act Four thing is us seeing his heart pecked apart by the world that doesn’t just misunderstand him, it doesn’t care. It’s the most beautiful and awful metaphor for what it’s like to want love when the people around you don’t love you. It’s not even about being gay.”
Victor and his partner/lover/husband Andy are the heroes of my novels EXPOSURE, THE GHOST OF CARLOS GARDEL, and NEVER ENOUGH - find them here: CO-STARS