‘Swan Lake’: heat welcome in Madrid for Tamara Rojo’s San Francisco Ballet | Culture | EUROtoday

At the final Venice Biennale, the dissident Russian artist Anna Jermolaeva introduced, as a part of the Austrian pavilion, an set up titled Essay for Swan Lake, and the artist advised journalist Nicole Scheyerer: “In my youth, I experienced three times that Russian state television broadcast nothing but Swan Lake all day long” (recollects Jermolaeva, born in 1970 in Saint Petersburg). Such loop narcotizing swans in steady “was first broadcast in 1982, after the death of the head of the Soviet state Leonid Brezhnev. Instead of an official announcement of the death, the political power vacuum was filled on state television with an endless dance. With Tchaikovsky’s most famous work as information censorship, the communist regime gained time to regroup behind the scenes,” summarizes Scheyerer. In Venice, in Jermolaeva’s set up, the actual white swan in entrance of the video is the Ukrainian dancer Oksana Seryeieva, who fled the battle in 2022 and took refuge in Vienna. In Russia, a saying was created that have to be mentioned quietly and secretly, and that’s repeated eagerly like a promising mantra: “I hope that Swan Lake appear on television soon.”

That ballet is a monument of symbolic and inventive permanence and so we’re as we speak, within the snug seat of a theater, 147 years after its premiere, having fun with it and assuming its energy. Already within the authentic fairy story by Johann Musäus (then it was first referred to as within the French translation The swan pondthere was no “lake” however a grimy pond, however the authentic in German was referred to as The stolen veil and it was not translated into Russian till properly after the premiere of the ballet: on the Moscow Bolshoi Theater all of the workers spoke French and a variety of German) good and evil stir in an ethical, and even aesthetic, battle.

We often name the ballets that, after vicissitudes and manipulations, gallantly withstood time, “classics of the great repertoire”; Although it sounds exhaustive and merciless, they attain, scraping away, a dozen titles. It is what it’s; They are the nice symphonies of the style, our specific Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann, Berlioz, Bruckner and Mahler, maybe additionally Tchaikovsky (the comparability is only a matter of style). And these ballets should additionally aspire to be everlasting, to be represented cyclically as an obligation of all of the artists concerned in direction of artwork, its humanism and its transcendence. Swan Lake It is a part of that improbable building, of that collective monument.

Once we’re conscious that this Lago What we see as we speak is a fancy and chemically masterful artifact, let’s tighten some strings as Lezama Lima mentioned, and say a minimum of three goal truths: solely 75% of the rating in up to date use is authorially attributable to Tchaikovsky (the order of the numbers has additionally been assorted his personal with notable additions, primarily by Drigo, along with some disputed items by Minkus and the very interventionist version by Jungersson); The surviving choreography emanates 90% from the drastic revision by Petipa and Ivanov of 1895, and we can not converse of a single and definitive canonical model, however fairly of a steady enchanting and at all times resulting in enchancment, each structural and choreographic. With the general orchestration, the map is much more intricate and virtually cabalistic.

He Lago It is a part of a fairy story, however it’s the ballet with a fairy story that rapidly ceases to be fairy story and strikes on to a special and superior symbolic and paradigmatic connotation. The battle between good and evil is at all times current—and highlighted on this case—however its illustration and growth within the tragic offers it an distinctive dramatic tone. In it Swan Lake authentic (and was taken up once more by Nuréyev after many doubts and consultations: Demidov, Sloninski, Wiley), Odette and Siegfried drown by suicide in these waters which can be as cursed as they’re enchanted (and stagnant); Tomasson additionally marks it that approach. The very Hollywood resolution of redemption, breaking the enchantment and its fatality and a completely inappropriate blissful ending (whereas the music is clearly dictating to us the catastrophe and its sentimental tear) gained power early, and is repeated as we speak with out disgrace. It is an possibility that have to be accepted, skipping the whole tone and temper of the masterful fourth act, the place, by composition, Tchaikovsky brings us nearer to the best misfortunes: inevitability of future, deviousness of the motion in order that evil doesn’t lose its luster. What do these opinions inform us? that he Lago It is alive, very alive, you could proceed having fun with it, vibrate with its songs and admire its highly effective packaging, at occasions so symphonic.

Helgi Tomasson, former inventive director of the San Francisco Ballet, after the success of his manufacturing of sleeping magnificence in 1990 (the primary ballet in the whole world whose manufacturing reached 1,000,000 {dollars}: it was some huge cash then and it’s now), he took off and launched himself into the Lago, which he was capable of do by non-public donations of many zeros, and even a couple of years later, in 2016, once more alongside the identical line of patronage, he expanded and renovated it. Some famend critic mentioned that clearly second variations had been by no means higher and that the primary remained his nice choral and plastic work; that is debatable. The manufacturing was introduced this Tuesday on the Teatro Real in Madrid, within the first worldwide tour of the San Francisco Ballet below the route of the Spanish Tamara Rojo. We are confronted with an opulent, highly effective, well-made and carried out ballet, critically produced and preserved. And in fact there could also be buts, there at all times are, however they’re minor or avoidable. Of among the many Lagos as we speak available on the market, Tomasson’s will be exhibited among the many finest, which aren’t precisely the final to reach on supply.

The San Francisco Ballet has given higher performances, however the premiere had considerable optimistic vibes and confirmed that there’s, and a well-established, devoted viewers for conventional ballet, the popularly referred to as – colloquially – traditional, being extra correct to specific it as tutorial. Good designs preserve virtually all their verve.

The efficiency had its share of emotion, like each premiere, however it was not spherical; There had been quite a few technical failures, the orchestral director (who’s reputed to be good at what he does) was in a rush and this hindered some dance elements, the lights had been lacerating and harsh, unwelcoming to the plot and motion; The dance group was coherent, at all times on the margins of dancing this “American style”, that’s: sooner, extra open, extra geometric and in sq. (with different accentuations of its personal till bordering on the balanchinianonot precisely chilly: it is a matter of faculty), and the soloists, who’re mature and prestigious artists, at occasions appeared to not have the deep appearing communication that the plot and work require. In any case, these features are an incredible celebration.