Swan Lake Studies 79-90
79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90. (“Swan Lake” series). Mime in ballet works best when it is not delivered as isolated set pieces but is part of an integral system of stage behaviour. The mime sequence for Odette and Siegfried doesn’t come out of nowhere. In context of the whole ballet, we’ve already seen the Princess Mother, in the opening scene, mime her views of Siegfried’s drinking, his duties to choose a bride, and her reminder of the importance of the forthcoming ball. (Remember that only in degenerate productions does she give him a crossbow. See 83 in this series.)
But this very lakeside scene should open with a marvellously lucid mime scene for the huntsmen and Siegfried. If you’ve never seen this, go to the Royal Ballet’s 1980 broadcast, currently on YouTube at https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGCdo4XTipo . It’s exemplary in several ways - not because it gives us exactly what happened in Lev Ivanov’s 1895 production (it doesn’t - no Benno, for example), but because it shows us how fluently mime can both communicate and show us the social values and body language implicit behind the gestures. I attach twelve freeze-frame images here, but it’s worth watching the whole sequence:-
A huntsman enters and sees swans;
79: he shows the swans to one comrade;
80: he summons the others;
they fill the stage and consider their shooting;
they’re joined by Prince Siegfried;
81: the first huntsman says to Siegfried “May we -
82: “- shoot those swans?”
83: Siegfried replies at once, courteously but firmly: “No.
84: “I -
85: “- here -
86: “- will shoot-
87: “- the first one.
88: - Begone!”
89: They all bow.
90: He, in Garbo-like need of being alone, reiterates: “Go!”
Just the way the huntsmen pay attention to his presence and his sign language tells us much about the world of this ballet; and the peculiar grammar of mime, registering on some of us with every gesture, on others of us in a more generalised way, reminds us of how characters in this stage world communicate with one another. The music here, relatively straightforward, does not threaten to overpower the sign language.
It’s straight after that that he sees the Swan Queen become the human Odette. Having been about to shoot her, he begins to lose his heart to her. There should follow the great if problematic mime scene between him and Odette. Unfortunately, the Odette in the 1980 “Swan Lake” was the brilliant but maddening Natalia Makarova. Having just staged the full-length “La Bayadère” for American Ballet Theatre that very spring, with multiple sustained mime scenes, it didn’t occur to her that Odette’s mime scene should also be at last included in her own celebrated performance. She, so capable of choosing new alternatives within her greatest roles and improvising immediate changes, always clung to the mime-less waffle she had always known from the Kirov in her fifteen or more years in this role. And so the 1980 Royal Ballet production includes super-clear mime from the entire company - apart from the ballerina in the central role. The leading huntsman here is Robert Jude; Prince Siegfried is Anthony Dowell. Each Siegfried would inflect the mime speech here differently: Dowell’s very show-them-the-whites-of-your-eyes was highly elegant but on the Helpmann, fruity end of the scale; I remember the less melodramatic but no less powerful way that David Wall and Stephen Jefferies would utter the same gestures.
Wednesday 12 August
79: “See the swans!”
80: “Companions, come this way!”
81: “Sir, may we -”
82: “- shoot those swans we see over there?”
83: “Wait a moment -”
84: “- I myself - ”
85: “ - here - ”
86: “- must shoot - ”
87: “ - the first.” (Some translate this as “alone”.)
88: The huntsmen bow to the prince.
89: “Be gone.”
90: “That includes you.”