Swan Lake Studies 53-64
53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64. “Swan Lake” studies continued. As she crosses the stage in her entrance diagonal, Odette executes three (sometimes two) “swan” arabesques. Then in her solo variation later in the first lakeside scene she does several more such arabesques, usually after pairs of sissonnes.
According to Robert Helpmann in 1980 (“Steps, Notes, and Squeaks”), Tamara Karsavina said that, in those first three arabesques, Odette felt her way from her swan condition to womanhood - though I don’t know what this meant, since each Odette of my experience has given equal emphasis to the entrance arabesques. But it was fascinating to hear Sara Mearns remark in Thursday 30 July’s City Center episode that this passage feels alarmingly quiet. Odette is - thinks she is - alone in space, expanding soulfully into the air.
There is much to say of the “swan” arabesque - by which I mean the one with both arms raised to equal height, showing the torso arched and the arms and raised leg sending the lines of that arc out into space. Since Odette dances these arabesques at several points, they need not all be the same. But these arabesques are surely signs by which we recognise the epic, tragic, heroic nature of this ballet’s drama; the arc of the heroine’s back communicates an expressionist tension that’s singular within ballet imagery, and the straightened limbs (even when the knee is bent in what the British call “attibesque”) beam that drama out into infinity.
It’s interesting to see how swan lines have changed over the last eighty years. My Odettes here are
1: Sara Mearns on Thursday;
2: the Bolshoi’s Marina Semenova (Semionova) (“she was queen of back”: Nina Ananiashvili) in 1940 on film;
3: Maria Tallchief, the original Odette of Balanchine’s one-act “Swan Lake” (1951), in 1954 on TV;
4, 5, Margot Fonteyn in the early/mid-1960s, in her forties (first photo by Keith Money; the second photograph shows Fonteyn, mistress of the straight-knee line, allowing the knee to break the line subtly);
6, 7: Antoinette Sibley in the early 1970s (photos by Leslie Spatt);
8: Alfreda Thorogood, also in the early 1970s;
9: Darcey Bussell, probably in the early 1990s;
10: Viviana Durante in the early 1990s;
11: Sarah Lamb, this century, probably in the last decade;
12: Marianela Nuñez, also probably in the last decade.
Sibley once told me that, as a young ballerina, she told Karsavina how much she wished she could employ the Romantically bent-leg lines of some Russian ballerinas, but that she knew her style depended on straight lines. Karsavina surprised her by saying that no, Odette was the purest and most classical of all the nineteenth-century roles. Is it? Most of us see Odette as a classical role that (even if we seldom word it this way) is fused with Romantically soulful drama bordering on expressionism. How I wish we could interview Karsavina now about what she meant by classical purity. At any rate, these photographs show a wide range of straight-line interpretations of the swan arabesque. As I go on looking, my views on the higher legs of more recent Odettes change and change again; but that basic idea of the body’s heroically convex arc, the shoulders and face angled upwards into the sky, makes a potent impression on me again and again.
Saturday 1 August
