ATTITUDES: FACES AND PLACES.

Many years ago a dear friend of mine, the late Walter Sorell, edited a book of essays by various authors, called The Dance Has Many Faces. It always struck me as a wonderful title for a book, partly because it was so evocative and so suggestive, but even more because it was so true. The many faces of dance ... think about it. We are surely inclined to take the enormous variety of dance for granted, and perhaps, both as audiences and critics, we tend to bring the same criteria, the same set of eyes, the same vocabulary, and the same approach to each and every thing. One size fits all!

I am thinking of this as I write because I have just spent a professional week seeing two performances of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, as staged on Broadway by his oddly named British dance company, Adventures in Motion Pictures; two performances by the National Ballet of Canada, visiting New York for the first time in eleven years; and, finally, at the start of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1998 Next Wave Festival, the New York premiere of Bill T. Jones's latest work for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

Now, I intended to write about Bourne's Swan Lake--and I will; just try to stop me--but so much has already been said about it, particularly regarding its Broadway relevance, that I found myself wanting to pull back and put it much more into the context of our own microcosmic dance world. The superabundance of media spin surrounding this fascinating Swan Lake has inevitably led to an equal superabundance of misconceptions. There have been claims that this is more of a Broadway musical than a ballet. Well, no one sings, no one even talks; the Tchaikovsky score, in the Petipa-Ivanov 1895 recension, is used, in order and uncut. It moves like a ballet, it sounds like a ballet, it looks like a ballet--I would say it was a ballet. Wouldn't you? But what will Broadway's Tony nominating committee say?

Then there is that question of the all-male Swan Lake, or the gay Swan Lake. Well, this is not Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo--a company that I cordially dislike--and it does not have men in tutus, with their bunions encased in pointe shoes. There are thirty-one men in the company, but also thirteen women. The Swans are danced by men rather than women--which accounts for the male-female ratio--and this is no incygnificant change. But they are not danced effeminately; quite the contrary. However, I must admit that as I was leaving one of the performances I attended, I overheard two women having nothing but praise for the way "you would never have guessed that those girls in the nightclub were really men." We live in confusing times, which is sometimes, although not always, a drag.

As for the gay Swan Lake with all its suggestions of homoerotic undertones, here I as a straight cannot pretend to any particular expertise. However, I do think that this gay appeal, made much of by the media, can be overstressed, although with the ballet's absence of sympathetic female characters there is a possibly fortuitous whiff of misogyny. Another aspect of the production that I find overemphasized is its supposed satire of the currently beleaguered British royal family. On both counts Bourne's small jokes--the Windsor wave, a Royal corgi, or the young prince giving a nude male statue a guilty second glance--certainly provide a subtext. Admittedly the lonely, loveless prince, seemingly fixated on swans from childhood, is saved from suicide in a London park by the image of a male swan. When he dies in madness, he finds comfort and peace in that swan's arms--a most unexpectedly moving image that could have found favor with mad King Ludwig of Bavaria--but a fantasy that is not necessarily circumscribed by a homosexual interpretation. Many children are lonely; many adults seek safety.

Where the Broadway showbiz production really differs from your usual Swan Lake is in its concept. Like quite a few deconstructed, counterculture stagings of classics--works by Peter Darrell, Rudolf Nureyev, Mats Ek, Derek Deane, and Mark Morris can be cited--Bourne has radically rethought his Swan Lake, providing it with an effectively high-concept gloss. The obvious change is the presence of those powerful, masculine swans, also introduced by Roland Petit, although Bourne's central imagery for these new and dangerous creatures is by far the most striking aspect of his choreography.

Yet, remember that Bourne is also designated as the work's director, as well as choreographer, and his dances are actually far more theatrically brilliant than choreographically rewarding. The first act, with its jerky, jokey Chaplinesque movements--and a deliberately silly butterfly ballet to the pas de trois music that recalls Jerome Robbins in The Concert or Gillian Lynne in her Phantom of the Opera inserts--is less than original, and even the dramatically arresting ballroom scene proves extraordinarily thin in its choreography. On the other hand, all those dances are seamlessly merged into a narrative that needs no words for total comprehension. No story notes in the Playbill! This--let's admit it--is not always the case in our sometimes almost obscurantist dance world. Also, Bourne matches his new story line with the old, and--what is more important--with the Tchaikovsky score, showing an adroitness merging on magic. This may be pop dance--but what can, or should, we learn from it?

It was an enormous pleasure for New York City to reencounter the National Ballet of Canada after far too long an absence, especially to see what its recently appointed artistic director, choreographer James Kudelka, was making of it. I was happily impressed by both his Desir, set to Prokofiev waltzes, and his Four Seasons, taking the Ages of Man as counterpoint to the calendar; however, at the risk of being a bit unfair, I must say that his Washington Square, a local premiere, would have gained much from Bourne's clarity of poetic storytelling. This clarity, this immediacy, is what many choreographers might take from the Broadway Swan Lake. Moving on to Brooklyn to watch the luminous beauty and unforced, occasionally opaque, imagery of Bill T. Jones's glorious We Set Out Early ... Visibility Was Poor, I was. reminded--if such a reminder were necessary--that, as those later Kudelkas also demonstrate, we must never forget in any quest for immediacy that the most proper subject for dance is, essentially, dance.

Clive Barnes, a senior editor, has contributed to Dance Magazine since 1958.