Swan Lake Studies 23-32
23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32. Back to “Swan Lake” studies. Who spends time thinking about the Act One waltz? Some productions have omitted it; in those that include it, some make it the ballet’s first dance (before the pas de trois) while others present it - as Marius Petipa did in 1895 - in the middle of the first scene, after the Princess Mother has made her entrance, issued her commands to her son, and returned to the palace.
When Nicholas Sergueyev first staged the 1895 “Swan Lake” for the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1934, he omitted Petipa’s waltz: the company simply didn’t have the manpower. The company never danced any version of that waltz until 1952, when Frederick Ashton set it as a marvellous pas de six (caught on film with its original two casts by Victor Jessen). Ashton subsequently expanded the numbers for this waltz in 1963, when it became a yet more glorious pas de douze, with the Prince sometimes joining in: you can see that on the 1980 film of the Royal Ballet production.
But Petipa’s waltz became lost in Russia, and was never danced in the West until Alexei Ratmansky reconstructed it in 2016: his production of the 1895 St Petersburg staging, performed in Zürich and Milan, has no revelation greater than this. We knew that Petipa’s waltz involved a corps of at least forty dancers, with stools and a maypole. (David Bintley tried the stools and the maypole for the Royal’s 1987-2015 .) When you see Petipa (1818-1910) achieved with those resources, you begin to feel he had every trick up his sleeve: this becomes one of the most brilliant demonstrations of his mastery.
These are freeze-frame snapshots from a private video of the production: I apologise to the Zürich dancers that they are not more perfect, but I congratulate them on the stylish detail they achieved. I would love to keep returning to this production to see a company build up a performing tradition within it, and to keep understanding Petipa’s art in greater depth.
(By the way, ballet people tend to speak as if ballet was the master race; I’ve no doubt I’ve committed this sin myself too. For example, it’s widely supposed that Frederick Ashton had the last word in maypole dances in “La Fille mal gardée”, which indeed has a superb example - though Petipa’s “Swan Lake” one is also worth catching. But the greatest maypole dance I ever saw was in a 2011 DanceAfrica performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Titled “Tumba Francesca”, it was choreographed by Robert David Linares, directed by Nieves de Armas, and performed by the Cutumba troupe from Santiago de Cuba. It was the highest-energy and most geometrically intricate maypole dance I ever saw; the dancers moved around the pole in not two concentric circles but three, tied the ribbons into knot-like meshes only then to undo them again by dancing, all at intense speed. I’m always sorry I only ever saw this once.)
Friday 17 July.
