by Leigh Witchel
Kevin McKenzie’s staging of “Swan Lake” for American Ballet Theatre is now old enough to drink. And still, it has rarely held together coherently. The date-rape prologue, a von Rothbart split into a horned swamp monster and purple seducer . . . it was unbalanced (why was von Rothbart more important in Act 3 than Odile?) and seemed more about its external qualities – stars and glamorous production values – than the story. But if there are unified laws of full-length ballets, it’s that they get more coherent the more they get performed, and strong performances in the leads can save almost any production. And we got that at a Saturday matinee.
Daniel Camargo is a guest artist with the company this season. Born in Brazil, trained in Stuttgart, with tenures as a principal dancer at both Stuttgart and Dutch National Ballets, his conception of Siegfried was uncomplicated but richly detailed, and it worked.
Watching the pas de trois, Camargo sat in a chair at the front as if he were used to asking his friends to perform for him. He knew his story and so did we. Camargo’s Siegfried was energetic and happy. When the Queen Mother presented him with a crossbow so large it took two maidens to carry it, he genuinely took pleasure in its receipt and thought about how and what he was going to hunt. Siegfried had shadows that we saw soon enough, but we got to see his vibrancy as well. Those points became his character.
He was also a ladies’ man. McKenzie inserted a dance into Act 1 (from the opening of the Act 3 pas de six in the original score), one of the young women of the court led it, (Zimmi Coker in an uncredited role), and she was the most intrepid of the lot.
She looked down and Camargo approached slowly and deliberately, then kissed her hand. There was a predatory quality. Not danger, but as with the crossbow, this Siegfried enjoyed the hunt. And so the Queen Mother’s demand that he marry wasn’t a provocation of an existential crisis. She wanted him to settle down, and marriage would put an end to most of his fun.
Blaine Hoven went in for Joseph Gorak as Benno, leading the pas de trois. He was rock solid in turns, not quite that in air turns. He has a habit of rolling his head when transitioning movement; it’s a welcome detail in contemporary work and an anachronism in classical. Fangqi Li danced the first variation at a leisurely pace but with pretty syncopation. She didn’t feel the the need to end every phrase right on a note.
After the pas de trois, there was a group dance where couples paired off that Siegfried tried to fit into but continuously couldn’t. It hinted at a darker side to him, and set him up for the melancholy adagio that came next. In turns à la seconde that flipped into a promenade, you could see Camargo’s fine leg lines, and he moved in character – transitioning from one turn into another with impetuous swings.
Narrative detailing went past the leads. During another group dance one young man dropped a woman as a comic moment, but apologized to her and invited her to drink. As with most of McKenzie’s stagings, the male dancing has been continually ratcheted higher: the corps men in the Act 1 waltz all do double tour to knee, a risky step to do synchronized. One guy hit his hands to the floor.
Transitioning to the lakeside, after two decades Zack Brown’s Dürer-inspired trees are still beautiful. His backdrop for the act pointed out a small continuity question that many productions have – if von Rothbart’s realm is across the lake from the castle, which we can see across the water not all that far away, why does the court seem as if they’ve never heard of this guy before?
Isabella Boylston is a jumper, and she came onstage in a huge high leap. She and Camargo had both chemistry and clarity; you could see it in his surprise on encountering her and repeated attempts to prevent her from fleeing.
She did the famous mime Act 2 slowly and clearly. It affected Camargo. He became more deliberate, taking his time to swear his love, as if thinking through all the possible implications. In the same way, when he encountered von Rothbart, you could see the wheels turn as he decided to try and shoot the sorcerer.
Boylston touched his hand before they began dancing, but took it from him sharply, and the twitchy bird heads she used came across as a form of resistance and nervousness. She didn’t trust him yet, and it was easy to remember she had reason to fear suitors.
Boylston’s line veered between extravagant and wonky. She was flappy, with legs that shot up to the sides and a back that arched. When dancing with Camargo she bent all the way forward and leaned all the way back into his arms. She took advantage of this quality in a turn; instead of keeping her arms up in an academic position, she crossed her wrists unevenly to create a whirling vortex as she spun and plunged into penché.
The coda was brisk; conductor David LaMarche took almost no pause when Boylston reappeared to do the diagonal of fouettés. In McKenzie’s production, the arabesques aren’t an applause point, that’s the pause at the exiting attitude balance after Odette finishes the entrechats. The arabesques also were not as focused; Boylston did them with her body slightly arced towards her arm as if she were resting her head in her wing. It’s bird-like, but less effective; she wasn’t looking out as she reached. Another detail every Odette does differently: when von Rothbart forced her to leave, she didn’t hold her arms straight to the side, but slightly up. After lifting her high, Camargo once again, very slowly and deliberately, swore undying love.
The balance of dance to story in McKenzie’s version is somewhere in the middle. There is mime, the story gets told, but in Act 3 the production dove right into dance numbers, including the national dances. Eric Tamm was one of the two men in the Spanish dance; he rejoined the company in 2020 and it’s good to have him back. From the descriptions of McKenzie’s first production of “Swan Lake” in 1993, it sounds as if Neapolitan has remained largely the same: a male duet that was a cascade of multiple pirouettes and tricks. Jake Roxander and Elwince Magbitang were excessive but impressive; at least they turned rather than spun.
At this point after the lakeside, Siegfried is often overwrought (Liam Scarlett’s production for the Royal Ballet posits that he rushed from the lake and had to hurriedly change outfits). Siegfried’s relationship here with the Tutor in Act 1 and the Queen Mother in both court acts was similar, and detailed. They both seem baffled by him. Nancy Raffa gestured at first above her head as if to ask, “What is wrong with you? Here are four princesses, marry one of them!”
Camargo was more in control; polite to the Queen Mother and suitors but again insular and isolated. He danced with each princess politely, but by rote. We could see the shift in interest from Act 1. Camargo didn’t fret, rather you sensed the wheels turning as he tried to figure out how to get out of this mess. He made his thoughts clear, but used the same polite arm time after time. There could be a balance between showing Siegfried responding by rote and keeping him from acting like an automaton.
Jarod Curley, tall and young (he was only made an apprentice at the end of 2018) made his debut as von Rothbart a few days prior. This was a big break and he made the most of it. His performance was right on the line of fatuous: he did a take to the audience bang on a plucked note before he expertly tossed his cape several feet to neatly land on an empty chair. He grinned from ear to ear, loving the treachery, physically moving one princess out of the way to seduce another.
McKenzie’s 2000 staging was his second for the company, and if it was influenced by anything besides the canonical stagings, it was commercial theater. “Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake” made its debut in London in 1995. Adam Cooper’s Tony-nominated and seductive portrayal of a leather-wearing von Rothbart figure in Act 3 came to Broadway in late October 1998, just in time to be on McKenzie’s mind as he mounted his own version. He created a dance for von Rothbart to the same music as Bourne, the Russian dance that was added to the ballet by Tchaikovsky for Pelagia Karpakova.
The Queen Mother was easily mollified by von Rothbart and taken in as well. From Curley, you got the sense that what was happening wasn’t just sexual magnetism, but sorcery. A small detail, but evidence, at the end of the act, the swamp creature von Rothbart closed doors without touching them. But also, so much has happened since the millennium. The world has changed. Sexual politics are more pronounced than they were; the world of women and men in “Swan Lake” had a different balance here. Von Rothbart may be a grinning rogue who seduces all the women, but when Camargo slanted Siegfried also as a seducer, did that make them distant cousins?
At the same time, Siegfried was on his own. McKenzie left out the pleading vision of Odette, so von Rothbart and Odile can do their dirty work without even a warning from her. With the energy Camargo committed to his belief in Odette, was all the fault really in himself rather than in his stars? In Curley’s magic, and the ease with which he controlled the entire court, was it now guilty, even if through trickery, of the same mistake as Siegfried?
Unlike Curley, Boylston’s Odile wasn’t gleeful. She was cruel. She rejected Siegfried’s affection continuously and shooed him away to consult with her father. There was almost a sense she was taking something out on Siegfried that connected to Odette’s wary rejections of Siegfried we saw before the intermission.
Their partnering was good, but a few times it seemed neither of them was sure whether Boylston was going to turn another time or if Camargo should stop her.
He pushed himself in his solo: double cabrioles, consecutive double air turns winding up with a double tour to the knee. By the coda you could see he was getting tired, but he worked that into Siegfried’s emotional state. Boyslton’s solo work was capable. She knocked everything out, including fast single fouettés that finished cleanly with arms overhead, but it didn’t sparkle.
After the deception it was clear not just what happened, but that Siegfried figured out the deception: he pointed to von Rothbart and accused him. He wasn’t just letting things happen to him, and it made him sympathetic.
Act 4 moved quickly, from the swans gathering in front of the scrim, straight into the storm. Camargo got blown in by it, emotionally spent and collapsing on the stage. Even if Siegfried didn’t know it yet, he looked as if he might die that day. This production left in enough mime that Boylston could explain to Camargo the only way to break von Rothbart’s hold was to die.
The reconciliation developed methodically; she protected herself from him at first. He knelt before her; even as they danced she still explained again: she had to die. The swans walked across the back slowly as the pressure in the music mounted, and Camargo swore his love once again. They reached communion as he carried her to and fro to a final overhead press. Buoyed but too optimistic, he tried to fight von Rothbart and was no match for the sorceror’s magic. Duncan Lyle deserved credit for taking von Rothbart the monster, a thankless role, and doing it wholeheartedly. When Boylston mimed once again the only way to escape the curse was to die, Camargo pulled her hands apart as if to try to erase the idea.
But there wasn’t another way out. She ran to the cliff and jumped. He followed her in a showy, dramatic leap that would have been funny if he hadn’t fully earned it. Von Rothbart was vanquished, Odette was freed and Siegfried was redeemed, even if only in death.
Many of these details didn’t just arise unique to these dancers and this performance. Anna Kisselgoff mentioned Siegfried as a playboy and other moments in her review when the production made its New York debut. But details go into and out of eclipse.
Even long term productions change. In Act 3, the pas de trois dancers from Act 1 start this act off with another divertissement; in a 2005 telecast of this production this number was not there. There may have been tweaking, there may have been coaching, there may be exemplary talent, but it’s always impressive that a strong performance can make a case for the entire show.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Swan Lake” – American Ballet Theatre
Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY
July 2, 2022
Cover: Isabella Boylston and Daniel Camargo in “Swan Lake.” Photo © Rosalie O’Connor.
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