Swan Lake Studies 3, 4

3, 4. These two photographs show Act Two of the Royal Ballet 1971-1976 production of “Swan Lake”. Alfreda Thorogood is Odette, a role she did not dance long. The corps of swans is led by Vergie Derman (who began to dance Odette-Odile in 1976) and Ria Peri, with Sally Inkin and Sandra Conley on either side. Behind them, two of the four cygnets are Rosemary Taylor and the valiant Anita Young. David Adams, I’m told, is seen as Rothbart.

The Royal Ballet’s female corps had become an important part of its international glory from 1948 onward. (The great critic Edwin Denby said in 1969 that the Sadler’s Wells “Swan Lake” performances he had seen in Paris in 1948 had remained defintive in his mind.) That excellence was burnished in the 1960s and 1970s, when the corps regularly danced Rudolf Nureyev’s production of the Shades scene of “La Bayadère” with superlative classical style. They won the “Evening Standard” award for dance in the mid-1970s: richly deserved. From 1979 onward, I observed some diminution in stylistic rigour, never fully regained.

Thursday 9 July.