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MYSTERIES OF "SWAN LAKE"
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This "Swan Lake" is a collaboration; Petipa made the public parts that happen at court, but Ivanov made the ballet's essence, the private, secret, dream parts of it, the parts about longing. We know woefully little about Ivanov. He was an orphan put into the Imperial Ballet School young; he became a leading dancer and originated many roles in Petipa ballets. He was intensely musical and could play whole ballet scores straight through by ear on the piano. He was also a modest and melancholy man, always under the shadow of Petipa, unable to stick up for himself. He had a propensity for drink. His first wife, a ballerina, abandoned him and their three children (one of whom was deaf); he had three more children with another wife. "How much has been experienced; how much blood has been soured because of hurt pride and humiliated human dignity," wrote Ivanov at the end of his memoirs, in 1899.
Because of his melancholy (and extreme musical sensitivity), Ivanov was a perfect match for Tchaikovsky's score. Another wounded and sensitive psyche! The story of a wounded bird and a wounded prince told in dance and music by two wounded men. However, more than melancholy makes this ballet great. In his handling of the corps de ballet, the swans, Ivanov shows his mastery of Petipa's own grand version of romantic ballet, which we call classical: the manipulation of the corps de ballet and the counterpoint of soloists and corps.
But Ivanov added something more. This was the first time that classical ballet's corps of staple maidens weren't ghosts (the Wilis of "Giselle," the shades of "La Bayadère"), but actual birds. Ivanov gives us in the steps the feeling of flying and of swimming on the water -- of birds. The Swan Queen's famous head-in-wing thing is his invention. Ivanov's imagination never lost sight of the immediacy of his ballerina's tragic dual existence -- maiden turned into bird.
In the heart of the ballet, the Act II love duet, Odette enters on a shower of harp notes and bows down to Siegfried like a bird landing on a lake, closing its wings. Then he takes her arms and "opens" her up. In their dance, Ivanov alternates fainting, melting images of sadness with images of flying. Near the beginning Odette tries to fly away; the Prince lifts her for the effect, but then it's as if he brings her down out of the air. A little later, he lifts her in a circle around his head in a kind of triumphant flight. The whole duet is about giving up one kind of flying and learning another; internal flying, we might call it. In one of the last movement phrases, the Prince folds the Swan Queen's "wings" over her chest, and she tries to nestle her head, as if relinquishing being a swan, but it's hard. At the very end of the dance, the final "finger turns" (he supports her by a finger; she turns in front of him), we see her beat her foot lightly against her ankle, like the quivering of the last birdness in her as she stops being a wild thing and agrees to be a loved thing.
Petipa was a great choreographer of symbolic movement -- his steps evoke qualities and they respond to each other in mysterious relationships. But Ivanov was the great semiliteral human choreographer, the master of immediate physical sensuality and of the emotions that arise from the body.
Top banner photos: Ballerina Gillian Murphy as Princess Odette, and with co-star Angel Corella as Prince Siegfried (all photos by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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Gillian Murphy dances the dual role of Odette and Odile in "Swan Lake" (photo by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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Gillian Murphy has been a dancer with ABT for nearly 10 years (photo by Marty Sohl -- Thirteen/WNET). |
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This program is available on DVD. |
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