Quick switch to British choreographer Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, currently playing to sold-out crowds and standing ovations at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. No trembling here; in fact, there’s no Odette, and no undulating lines of swan maidens. This lakeside scene is full of men–massive, fierce male swans, with bare chests and legs wrapped in feathers, prowling and lunging, flexing their backs, ripping the air with their arms as ff wings were weapons. As for that moment of transformation, it’s been deftly reversed. This is an entrance, not an exit: the object of the Prince’s desire glides on-stage backward, oozing muscu-larity and power. Yes, it’s a guy.
Dance companies have always trolled for gold in the classics, year after year programming “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Giselle” and that most beloved of all cash cows, “The Nutcracker.” Dancers flourish on them, and so do subscription sales. But even devout balletomanes have been known to start shifting miserably in their seats as yet another trio of roistering peasants launches into a joyous divertissement while the nobility stand around in their costumes holding goblets. Hence the perennial efforts to revise or update these works, with results ranging from Peter Martins’s handsomely streamlined “The Sleeping Beauty,” for the New York City Ballet, to a messy heap of Freudian “Nutcrackers.” This season the most talked-about dance events on both coasts are classics reclassified: Bourne’s male “Swan Lake” and, in New York, American Ballet Theatre’s Othello. The ABT work represents a rare attempt to revise the canon by adding to it, for here is a three-act ballet in the classic style that’s newly built from scratch.
Bourne’s award-winning “Swan Lake,” which has toured Britain and played for six months in London’s Piccadilly Theatre, isn’t technically a ballet at all; it’s performed by his contemporary-dance company, Adventures in Motion Pictures. He retains the Tchaikovsky music and the essence of the narrative, as well as an occasional quotation from the ballet, ingeniously reworked. But the rest is his, and it’s unforgettable. This is no campy “Gay Lake”; it’s a universal story retold in a new language. The tale unfolds in 1950s London, where the Prince (Scott Ambler), fragile and tormented by fantasies, encounters those very fantasies in the flesh, not to mention the feathers, one moonlit night in a park. He falls for one of the swans, powerfully danced by Adam Cooper; but evil pursues them, and sexual betrayals lead to disaster. While the swan imagery is dazzling and psychologically acute, Bourne’s witty, stylized dances for servants and socialites actually have the better choreography. But choreography isn’t the star here: Bourne’s real gift is for brilliantly imagined theater. Next winter this production will open on Broadway, which is just where it belongs.
“Othello,” too, has more impact as theater than as dance, but that’s because the scenery has all the lines. George Tsypin’s huge, brooding sets, with cracked glass panels towering over the dancers, make the stage seem so vast and impersonal we instantly feel the pathos of the tragedy. But choreographer Lar Lubovitch doesn’t fill the space with the poetry it needs. Some of the dance passages are wonderful-Iago like an evil cat springing onto Othello’s shoulders, or the pointing fingers that dart from Bianca to Cassio to Othello, tracing Iago’s lie to its target. But a lot of the choreography looks as though it came from one of those grainy, arty ballet photographs–bowed heads, out flung arms, super impassioned posturing. To be fair, Lubovitch never had a chance. Terpsichore herself would have changed careers in the face of Elliot Goldenthai’s bumpy, blatty score, without two consecutive notes that could drive movement. Ballet lovers interested in ABT’s dancers, who look terrific these days, should catch them in one of the signature works they do so beautifully. Like “Swan Lake.” Nina Ananiashvili’s Swan Queen is breathtaking-a reminder of what made the classics classic in the first place.
