by Leigh Witchel
Any New Yorker talking about “Swan Lake” in London needs to start with a disclaimer: The Royal Ballet’s “Swan Lake,” even if it is Not What It Used To Be, is still sounder at its core than any production we have in New York. The most fascinating aspects aren’t the differences in choreographic details, but in priorities: what seems to matter most in each.
Though it was a shame that Marianela Nuñez had to bow out of the opening night due to COVID, with 24 hours’ notice Yasmine Naghdi proved an estimable substitute. Artistic Director Kevin O’Hare made a curtain announcement about the cast change, and the Ukrainian National anthem was played. The audience rose to its feet as one.
Liam Scarlett’s production of the ballet replaced Anthony Dowell’s in 2018; its last run in 2020 was cut short by the pandemic. To a New Yorker, Scarlett’s prologue looks like a cousin to Kevin McKenzie’s version for American Ballet Theatre. It shows the princess being menaced by Von Rothbart and her transformation to a swan, but Scarlett’s version felt shorter and less rapey. Mercifully, there were also no stuffed birds. When Von Rothbart stole Odette’s crown, Scarlett slanted Von Rothbart’s desire as less purely sexual and more inextricably attached to a hunger for power.
This version is set around the time of the music’s composition, in Tsarist Russia at a summer palace. Like the choreographers he was inspired by, Scarlett tried to tie together details to make the narrative more hermetic, without greatly affecting the dancing. The two women who dance the pas de trois are now Prince Siegfried’s sisters; Benno also gives Siegfried a birthday gift; a drinking goblet that foreshadows the later goblet dance.
Even with changed steps and narrative details, Scarlett was working in an attractive classical style. The opening waltz, like all his group dances, were clear and had air in them; he wasn’t afraid that simple meant no signature or individuality. The opening waltz began with soldiers and officers, adding women after. The care the men gave to port de bras was gorgeous. If New York City Ballet makes the stereotypical case for being a feet-and-legs company, The Royal Ballet is the stereotypical poignant argument for an upper body company. Everyone does arm work the same and it’s beautiful.
Scarlett’s goblet dance was big in scale, clear in patterning yet without fussiness or jammed-in vocabulary. He gave the corps airy and gracefully curved port de bras, and asked for a buoyant torso. He wasn’t trying to change the company’s training.
In his human guise, Von Rothbart, played by Bennet Gartside, was a Rasputin-like minister in an open-collared black frock coat. He escorted the Queen, Christina Arestis, onstage. Tall and stately, wearing glamorous and bedazzled mourning, her character was infused with an essential sadness. Distant from her son, she still gave him his birthday present: his late father’s crossbow.
With Von Rothbart’s encouragement, she let Siegfried know it was time to marry. Again, another small detail; he was supposed to dance with his sisters, but was so upset that he asked Benno to dance instead, starting the pas de trois.
Similarly, in the first variation, danced by Isabella Gasparini, Scarlett made sure there was an officer downstage left to toast Gasparini and give her a focus for her long diagonal. Dowell’s production used this same device, but during Odile’s solo. Later on, in the second solo, Benno became the focus of the other sister’s diagonal.
The solos seemed tweaked slightly, but not radically revised. James Hay started off Benno’s variation with simple jetés and assemblés, but then moved to a perfect double tour, then turns ending on balance in half toe, finally ripping into a diagonal of tours in passé. Hay stitched the whole thing with fluid elegance; not just as a virtuoso, but a stylist. The Royal trains dancers like the British tailor suits. You need to look past the exterior; the impressive stuff is often on the inside.
Where Dowell’s staging posited Siegfried as dissolute, and the New York stagings generally force the poor guy to make up his own story, Scarlett fills in more blanks. His Prince is young and in over his head with a mother who is easily influenced by a dangerous adviser. Scarlett has also tied both Siegfried and Odette to Von Rothbart. Siegfried’s refusal to follow Von Rothbart offstage physically affected the sorceror.
At the lake, Siegfried didn’t have the heart to hunt but didn’t really know what he wanted. Vadim Muntagirov took a pure, yearning arabesque with the crossbow and it said exactly what you needed to know. Scarlett used the Act 2 overture for a solo for Siegfried, and Muntagirov, with his long, easy lines, made it poetry. He’s been major for years, but we have only seen him rarely in the U.S. He’s got a relatively low profile for a dancer of his talent and stature.
The swan corps in London was that resonant sisterhood you wish every corps de ballet was. The women came galloping out at a brisk tempo, danced with one brain and the same style. They shared a fate, and a plight. The little swans continued the precision. The big swans had a different emphasis than in New York, and jumped out, going for sailing across the stage rather than soaring into the air.
With go-for-broke personalities such as Sara Mearns as the most influential avatars in New York, Odette’s character on our turf is Go Big Or Go Home – measured by the size of the emotional portrayal. The women who seemed to excite the London balletomanes most were far cooler. The Royal does “Swan Lake” as an exercise in form: not a pin feather is out of place and the emotional punch lives inside the precision. Odette and Siegfried’s adagio felt less lived than unspooled, but eloquently, like the recitation of a tragic sonnet.
Naghdi entered on a slower tempo and struck a still, quiet arabesque with the leg high, but not sky high. In the Balanchine one-act, Odette does no mime. Watching Naghdi do it and Muntagirov comprehend it made so much more sense. If it isn’t there, you get Peter Walker’s predicament in New York, where he hasn’t been told who Von Rothbart is and seems unaware why he’s so dangerous.
Naghdi is a swan, not a stork, with long but not crazy legs. And is she properly schooled. It barely mattered how little warning she got to do this, she was ready. She took the adagio at a slow pace, but it didn’t go dead; she could sustain it. The details were exquisite; how she gave her foot a little arc to add value to a small developpé, or how she offered her hand to Muntagirov.
Her solo and the coda were slow, but again, she could sustain it. The arabesques in the coda were beautiful. After a heart-stopping pause, she reached her arm to salute the pale, violent moon on John Macfarlane’s backdrop. And again a different priority than in New York: that was the applause point, not the entrechat-passés, which were done at a medium rather than blistering tempo.
One more: when Odette is retrieved by Von Rothbart, in his sorcerer guise, it happens on a big pang in the music, and many ballerinas react with their backs, (stealing this unforgettable metaphor from the wonderful San Francisco dance writer Paul Parish) like a trout that’s been hooked. Naghdi took the moment more purely, placing her arms to the sides without putting her back into it.
Macfarlane went all-out opulent in his Act 3 designs, with a ballroom of marble and ormolu. Von Rothbart escorted in the sisters, whom Benno danced with. Scarlett again dreamed up a reason Siegfried wasn’t dancing; he just rushed back from the lake and was changing his outfit. To cover for him, Benno and the sisters danced to music that in the NYCB production would be used for a pas de quatre, but in the last revival in ‘20 that divertissement was cut. The Royal’s version was again an exercise in schooling; Hay could make single pirouettes look good.
Muntagirov gave Siegfried agency and spirit here as well, telling his mother emphatically, “I will not marry any of them!” But then Von Rothbart announced one more guest, and introduced Odile. The national dances (including Ashton’s Neapolitan, which seemed to be added solely out of duty, as it did not have the sequined decadence of the others) came next.
Naghdi’s Odile was related to her Odette. They didn’t move differently, but in the same slow, measured way. She distinguished them in character: her Odile wasn’t a tool of her father, but a willing and active participant in Siegfried’s destruction. On the side, von Rothbart offered advice and direction, but she barely needed it. She was evil and she enjoyed it.
Form mattered again here; nothing was out of place. Naghdi took an arabesque with arms overhead; Muntagirov held her by the wrists, then let her go. Nothing moved. She was a luxury vehicle, offering him a smooth ride on the road to ruin. Muntagirov’s calling card is the purity of his technique as well. His Act 3 solo culminated in a series of impeccable double-to-double air turns.
Naghdi’s solo was similarly on. She did her attitude turns in a low tight attitude rather than a high, arcing one, but there was an air of confidence and danger. She only broke character briefly at the bow, where you could tell how happy she was at how things went. In the coda, Muntagirov finished his air turns in a glorious arabesque, Naghdi did her fouettés throwing in doubles evenly for the first half, then back to singles with a clean finish. She raced at him in the final diagonal of arabesques like a bird of prey after a baby squirrel. He didn’t stand a chance.
The ruse worked, Siegfried swore fidelity to the wrong woman. The production added one motivating detail. When exposing the ruse, Von Rothbart knocked the queen down and removed her crown, grabbing it for himself in an echo of what he did to Odette in the prologue. His hunger was again for power.
We returned to the lakeside, but filled with chilly fog. There’s far more leeway from canon in Act 4 than Act 2, and Scarlett fashioned a dance where two big swans led a slowly growing diagonal of the corps, and brought back the four little swans in a reprise as well.
For Naghdi, the cleanliness of Act 2 was a springboard to a more emotional Act 4. She raced out, crying “I am lost.” Scarlett devoted time to a carefully paced reconciliation. He swapped the music Dowell used, “Un Poco di Chopin,” for the more pressured and anguished music used also by both New York productions, originally composed for a pas de six in Act 3.
Odette’s reluctance to dance with Siegfried, his persistence in begging her to rise and forgive him, was done cautiously. Muntagirov handled Naghdi with the care you take when you were responsible for the wounds. Finally he bowed before her and she relented, bidding him to rise, and they reprised the close of their Act 2 duet.
After all the work put into fleshing out the story, Scarlett’s concept for the final conflict was unfortunately a let-down. Von Rothbart knocked Siegfried out so he remained unconscious for what seemed like weeks in the front of the stage, only to have him wake just in time to retrieve Odette’s drowned body, finally transformed back to a woman’s, on the closing notes. After the journey Siegfried also makes towards being the master of his own fate, to leave him out of the ending for what seemed like the sake of a closing tableau wasn’t enough.
The melancholy that hangs over the ballet has a scent that lingers and spreads, not only from the distant echo of where Russia is today, but the loss of Scarlett last year after scandal and suicide. There’s no easy way to discuss it, nor an easy way for The Royal to acknowledge Scarlett or his contribution – even his bio in the program simply ends in 2019 as if nothing further happened. What this “Swan Lake” shows is that he could handle a full-length production with a clean, clear style that was individual yet beautifully classical. Few young choreographers have the guts to not feel as if they need to distort classical ballet to put their own stamp on it. Scarlett had so much talent, gone way too soon.
“Swan Lake” is a ballet about destiny, about loss. It mixes despair and hope into one of ballet’s most beautiful laments. The resonance of the ballet is that its lament feels universal, and that everything, where we’ve been, where we are, what we’re facing, who we’ve lost, gets poured into it. It becomes more than just a pretty ballet, but a cry for all those trapped, lost and suffering.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Swan Lake” – The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, London
March 1, 2022
Cover: Yasmine Naghdi in “Swan Lake.” Photo: Bill Cooper.
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