Swan Lake Studies 69-78
69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78 (in the “Swan Lake series). As soon as Odette meets Siegfried, she takes flight from him around the stage: some of the images (not shown here) brandingly express her wildness and her alarm at a male intruder. Then, as she realises he does not mean to kill or trap her, she stops. There follows one of ballet’s longer and less comprehensible mime dialogues. In the late 1920s, Diaghilev, who has been presenting “Swan Lake” in the West since 1911 but was now experienced in presenting far more modernist creations of dance theatre, observed that audiences don’t understand the “Swan Lake” mime. He therefore required young George Balanchine to provide a dance substitute. Balanchine, who later would retain an equally complex mime speech in “The Nutcracker” and “Coppélia”, always kept this dance alternative.
This debate - mime or dance? - has gone on for this particular passage. When Nicholas Sergueyev staged the full-length “Swan Lake” for the Sadler’s Wells in 1934, he retained the mime, which the Royal British have championed ever since. Rudolf Nureyev, when dancing the ballet for the first time with Margot Fonteyn in 1962, insisted on excluding this mime scene, causing frissons of horror through the ranks of the British custodians of tradition who felt that their Saint Margot was going over to the Dark Side. Actually, Nureyev came round; Fonteyn, in her quiet way far more stubborn than he, returned to the mime scene in which she had moved many. After she had retired from that ballet, Nureyev, a mime convert,went on championing the mime: the greatest performance of this incident was in January 1977, when Lynn Seymour returned to the role of Odette-Odile one last time, with him as her partner. In 1986, he staged a “Swan Lake” for the Paris Opéra that was vile indeed most ways - but it included (not that it mattered) the mime.
A number of Western companies now do abbreviated versions of the mime scene. People who saw Fonteyn have often told me that the scene with her seemed to include features that were absent with other Odettes, though none of them have explained what they meant.
I see the problem from both sides. Tchaikovsky in 1877 was an immature ballet composer; one of the things he did not yet how to compose was mime music. So Odette and Siegfried converse in gestures to swelling, urgent music that sounds closer to opera than to ballet: many opera-friendly observers will have wanted them to burst into song, as I did at my first “Swan Lake” in 1975. Mime gestures don’t belong to this music as naturally as they do for equivalent passages in “The Sleeping Beauty” (1890) or “The Nutcracker” (1892).
But the alternative to mime is invariably worse. It involves Siegfried partnering Odette in various ways that obliterate serious meaning from their subsequent adagio. If he has been touching her, holding her, lifting her, turning her for a minute on this first question, why on earth does she later behave to him as if hypersensitive to both his touch and his gaze?
In her most complex mime speech here, Odette says “Look there (upstage)! That lake is made of my mother’s tears. Over there (upstage left), an evil man made me a swan. But if one man me will love, me will marry, I’ll be a swan no more.” I suspect that no uninitiated person has ever understood all the gestures involved in the Odette-Siegfried mime - and very few Odettes in my long experience have ever tried to show all the three successive gestures with the same finger that indicate “But” and “If” and “One” - and yet, even if you understand not even one of their gestures, you’ve understood other vitally dramatic things: Siegfried’s chivalry, Odette’s urgent need to explain her plight, her involvement with the lake, her association of evil with the upstage right corner.
The critic Clement Crisp has often claimed that the greatest dance actors have made mime speak with perfect sense to all the audience. All? There’s evidence that no such golden age ever existed. When the great dramatic choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre staged “Les Horaces” in Paris in 1777, many of the French old guard poured scorn on the mime gestures that they found preposterous; when Hector Berlioz discussed ballet during the Romantic era in Paris, he singled out the incomprehensibility of its mime gestures. Yet even the Kirov and Bolshoi Ballets, who like Balanchine replaced the Odette-Siegfried mime with meaningless dance, retained pompous and lengthy mime scenes in “La Bayadère” and other ballets.
In the last two years of her life, Fonteyn (1919-1991) coached young Royal ballerinas as Aurora and as Odette. Darcey Bussell once recalled Fonteyn at that time as the best coach she ever had, because she was so precise and urgent; and she especially worked on the mime scene. Present also was Donald MacLeary, who had partnered Fonteyn and known her for decades: he has said more than once that her coaching came as a revelation - because, beneath the actual gestures, she worked on the way Odette’s gesticulations indicate her various fluctuations of confidence: here Odette is still guarded, unused to human company, but here Odette is so relieved at last to speak that “it’s like verbal diarrhoea”. I’m not sure that Bussell or any subsequent Royal Odette caught the full psychodrama Fonteyn was explaining, but I’ve always been moved to hear of it, since something of it is indeed implicit in this strange but still powerful scene.
These photographs show just ten of the many gestures involved: “Over there (the lake upstage)”, “That lake”, “Mother”, “Tears”, “Over there (upstage left)”, “Evil man” (or “sorcerer”), “Swan”, “But”, “Marry”, and “Swear”. There are are various versions of these symbols - especially “Evil man” and “Swan”; and it’s worth noting how intensely Odette’s body language changes as she speaks. I suspect that neither Ivanov nor Petipa were too prescriptively exact on how or when dancers should interpret or deliver these mime speeches; and I suspect some touches - the bourrées en avant while indicating “Tears”, for example - are twentieth-century touches. The casts seen here are Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes, Romany Pajdak and Erico Montes, Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares, and Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell.
Tuesday 11 August
