NEW YORK CITY BALLET: SWAN LAKE.

NEW YORK CITY BALLET: SWAN JAKE APRIL 29-MAY 9, 1999 NEW YORK STATE THEATER 

Of all the ballets in the classic repertory only Giselle commands the same reverence as Swan Lake, and even Giselle is not so readily associated with ballet in the public consciousness as is Swan Lake. Would it, for example, have struck such a Broadway chord if dance iconoclast Matthew Bourne, instead of transgendering those Swans, had come up with the idea of male Wilis (called Willies, perhaps) saving Albrecht from a death worse than fate? I doubt it.

This raises the question: what is Swan Lake? In a way this is a harder question to answer than what is Giselle, and far, far harder than, say, what is Les Sylphides or what is Apollo? Obviously it is not the original Moscow production of 1877, of which, choreographically speaking, we know comparatively little apart from it being a failure.

Most ballet authorities take as their ground zero the 1895 St. Petersburg production by Marius Petipa (Acts I and III) and Lev Ivanov (Acts II and IV), later mounted by Nicholas Sergeyev (with certain modifications) first for Britain's Vic-Wells (later the Royal) Ballet in 1934, and then for Mona Inglesby's International Ballet in 1947. This basic Sergeyev restaging was first seen in the United States in 1949, during the Royal Ballet's first visit, and later (with a few further modifications) staged in 1967 by David Blair for American Ballet Theatre.

Almost every critic and many audience members have their ideal Swan Lake. If I were asked to mount a Swan Lake I would certainly take the 1895 version (with very few adaptations, such as the removal of Benno, the Prince's squire, from the Act II pas de deux); I would follow Mary Skeaping's Swedish precedent by having the national dances attached to the Prince's prospective brides; I would use Leonid Lavrovsky's version of the Spanish Dance and Frederick Ashton's version of the Neapolitan in Act III; and I would also add Ashton's Pas de Quatre in that act. I would have the scenery and costumes designed with close regard to nineteenth-century Romanticism and the Tchaikovsky score.

While abandoning the original Cecil Beaton designs, I would keep in repertory George Balanchine's one-act version from 1951--if anyone could now revive it--and take Ashton's 1963 staging of the last act and make it into a separate, plotless ballet. Like most people, I have a preexisting concept, or, if you want to be unpleasant, an agenda.

I am not so stupid as to demand that every Swan Lake remain the same; it can surely be accepted that City Ballet can be permitted, even encouraged, to take considerable leeway in the matter of experimentation. This does not mean anything goes, unless you want an Adventure in Motion Pictures.

Peter Martins's almost totally new rendering of Swan Lake made its bow at a gala performance on April 29, and it is apparently a slight reworking of the production he staged for the Royal Danish Ballet in Copenhagen nearly three years ago. He was assisted in its staging by Colleen Neary, a former member of City Ballet, now on the staff of the Royal Danish. Also, Martins retained for this City Ballet version--the first full-length Swan Lake the company has staged in its fifty-year history--the Danish designer Per Kirkeby; this was possibly the production's first and most crucial mistake.

Kirkeby, a well-known Copenhagen painter and sculptor, takes a virtually abstract approach to this late nineteenth-century ballet with its heavily symbolic narrative and its time-worn but time-honored romantic music by Tchaikovsky. Not perhaps a good, or even viable, idea. From the opening front cloth--which resembles nothing so much as a simplistic, paint-by-numbers impression of a Jackson Pollock drip canvas--the settings appear to vary from landscapes suggesting wispy Robert Rauschenberg-like images to a monumental faux-marble and painted wood interior court scene.

The costumes are equally bizarre: courtiers dressed as seventeenth-century Velazquez figures are contrasted with dancers in "orthodox" outfits of tights, leotards, and ballet skirts. Odd, too, is Kirkeby's palette of color: from the beginning the eye is assaulted by a Fauve-like mix of orange and emerald, startingly interrupted by one costume in royal blue and another in scarlet.

This was all the more surprising after Martins's earlier stylish, almost reverent staging of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, where not only was the designing in imaginative accord with the ballet, but the choreography kept reasonably close to the St. Petersburg original. Here, there is hardly a lake in this new Swan Lake, or at least not one readily discernible to the naked eye. Significantly, there isn't really too much drama either.

It is understandable that Martins would want something different for City Ballet's Swan Lake, and some of his choreography, particularly in the first scene, has a lightness and dexterity which is extremely pleasing, with many of the ensembles, especially for the men, truly brilliant. Even his inclusion of a Jester (a post-Soviet invention of Petipa's successor, Alexander Gorsky) is perfectly acceptable in this kind of nontraditional production; so is his use of music in the Court scene, rarely encountered in modern productions, but following precedents first set by Jack Carter at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires, and later, and, perhaps definitively, by Ashton for his own pas de quatre.

Most of the choreography for this new Swan Lake is Martins's own--with a few favorite gobbets adopted and adapted from the original. But little of it, while all very capable and musical, achieves the distinction and individuality of the classic 1895 version.

Dramatically, the story is skated over, with its thin ice often breaking under the choreographic weight. Moreover, the ending has the evil sorcerer, who first turned all these maidens into swans, defeated by true love; but that the heroine is still left a swan because of the unhappy hero's misguided faithlessness, is, while perhaps poetic justice, also totally illogical. Let evil triumph against flawed good if you like (it wasn't Tchaikovsky's story, but fine), but surely you shouldn't try to have it both ways, with the villain defeated yet the heroes still thwarted. It doesn't make sense.

The production was given twelve times during the first two weeks of the company's spring season--itself the second leg of the special celebration of its fiftieth anniversary year. I saw the production six times--with five Odettes (there should have been six but Wendy Whelan had to withdraw because of a minor injury) and six Siegfrieds, and corresponding changes and switches among the subsidiary roles; there were, for example, four Rothbarts, three Jesters and five Bennos, all of whom got to lead the Act I Pas de Trois. I must admit, after seeing the production six times I did become partially inoculated against the ugly and inappropriate scenery and costumes, and, concentrating on the dancing, rendered myself all but immune to those thin and often illogical dramatics. Familiarity breeds tolerance--at least it does when watching dance performances.

As this two-week total immersion in Swan Lake proceeded, it did seem to me that the company developed a growing authority in a style of ballet and mode of presentation that does not come second nature to it--despite its joyous performances of Martins's staging of The Sleeping Beauly in the past. As a result I found myself enjoying my last three performances considerably more that the first three, and even appreciating better some of the finer points of Martins's neoclassic choreography. I also appreciated Martins's following the practice of the Konstantin Sergeyev staging for the Kirov in the mid-sixties, and Erik Bruhn's version for the National Ballet of Canada a decade later, in splitting this into just two acts with one intermission.

There is insufficient space to deal with all the various casts in the detail they deserve and demand. The elegant (but technically beneath her best) Darci Kistler and the brilliant if slightly over-brusque Damian Woetzel were the first cast and gave the roles definite finesse. They were also scheduled to have danced the ballet on May 12 when it was televised on "Live from Lincoln Center" over public television, but Kistler was compelled to withdraw, almost at the last minute, and Woetzel partnered Miranda Weese in the telecast. Of the other couples Monique Meunier, gracious and womanly, and Weese, strong and technical, certainly gave the ballerina part its fair due, but while Peter Boal made a stylish Prince for Weese, Jock Soto, although partnering stalwartly, seemed miscast when matched with Meunier. Kyra Nichols (who had to withdraw from the second of her performances because of injury) was in fine form, and, partnered ably and considerately by Philip Neal, proved perhaps the most musically interesting of the Odette/Odiles in her rubato-accented choreographic phrasing.

It was not until the final Saturday, showing two young Swan Queens magnificently emerging into their queendom, that the production started to take wing. In the afternoon it was the debut of Maria Kowroski, generous and eloquent, dashingly partnered by Charles Askegard, while in the evening the gorgeous Meunier (replacing an injured Whelan and partnered by a discreet but princely Nilas Martins) seemed infinitely more at home as Odette/Odile than at her own debut the previous week.

There were plenty of other good performances on view, with all three of the Jesters--Benjamin Bowman, at the premiere, the very young Adam Hendrickson (in his first season with the company), and, the most experienced and consistent of them, Tom Gold--polished and spirited. Of the rest who distinguished themselves during these opening performances I can only offer a random laundry list of particular credit; this must at least include the admirably wicked Rothbarts, particularly of Albert Evans and Robert La Fosse, as well as both Benjamin Millepied and Edward Liang in a variety of cleanly danced classic guises.

It was most encouraging how Martins was able to bring his young dancers forward in so many varying roles. It was also good to see the adroit way he employed children in the ballet. They do, however, add a touch of realism that is at odds with the generally more abstract viewpoint of the ballet as a whole.