by Leigh Witchel
Natalia Osipova’s approach to “Swan Lake” couldn’t have been less similar to Yasmine Naghdi’s if they had danced it on separate continents. Where Naghdi found emotion in the form, Osipova has and will sacrifice form to maximize the emotion in her dancing. You could see it from her first entry.
Early on in her career Osipova was quoted as saying she wanted to suffer onstage. She still does what actors call “playing the end,” and facing the worst even when there might still be hope of a better outcome. At the lakeside, Osipova leapt out and immediately gave melodramatic bird: looking up and around, hugging herself and using wild arms. Her mime was speedy and urgent: “Wait! Someone will come, and swear his love for me.” Yearning, importuning, with all her gestures to the sky, she danced Odette’s predicament half in a crouch, projecting her anguish outwards from between her shoulder blades.
She entered for the adagio leading with her chest. Very little of what she did could have been described with academic ballet terms. They weren’t steps, they were actions, including reaching to her Siegfried, Reece Clarke, to touch his face. She looked to the heavens, breaking her neck line, and the adagio continued, soutenu, pose, look upwards, soutenu, wrapping her arms round herself. In the creation of her own story, almost everything was Flap or Wrap.
The Royal does the more common slow finish to the finale with shivering battements serrés. At the end Osipova gave a gasp and fell sideways before returning to suffer through tumultuous applause.
Because of their virtuosity, it used to seem that Osipova and Ashley Bouder were cut from similar cloth, but they’ve long since diverged. Now, Osipova and Sara Mearns are closer in intent. Like Mearns, you have to buy Osipova.
In her solo, she again looked up to the heavens before lifting her leg high to the side. Did she do a single academic line? She took the diagonal of arabesques in the finale super-slow. Her arm also raised to the heavens, but it looked isolated from the back. Yet when Von Rothbart put the whammy on her at the end of the act, she went from reacting with her back to looking as if she were going into cardiac arrest.
Osipova’s chosen partner, Reece Clarke, is tall, slim and elongated with dark hair and fair skin. His demeanor was less princely and more human than Muntagirov’s, with a sunnier disposition. His clouds formed externally from dealing with a distant mother and her hostile adviser. He stood at attention when his mother came to greet him, her subject more than her son. It wasn’t yet a balanced partnership with Osipova either; she treated him like a consort rather than an equal.
The intermission after Act 2 went longer than planned, until Artistic Director Kevin O’Hare came out to give a short curtain speech that Osipova felt “quite unwell but wants to try and continue.” And so this act became about the singular event of Osipova in Beast Mode. She did look physically off-form, so all of the exaggerations throughout the ballet could have been an attempt to compensate.
She arrived as glamorously as an Extra Special Guest Villainess, in a sparkly black tutu accessorized with a closed-mouthed but rapacious smile. Her relationship with Von Rothbart was a comradely partner-in-crime, asking him what he wanted her to do next, and doing it. Sure, it was the same dancer who played Odette half an hour before, but Siegfried did look like a moron for not being able to tell them apart. Osipova’s Odile acted as differently from Odette as someone who hacked your Facebook account and sent your friends messages to invest in Bitcoin.
Her Black Swan was slightly more of a vulture; she led through the dance with the back of her neck. She powered through her solo, making her first double attitude turn with a low attitude and floppy feet. But she made it. Somehow she made everything and slowly flapped back out to accept her due applause. Her smile suggested that she was either in pain or could have eaten all of us as a snack.
In Scarlett’s staging, Clarke changed outfits and arrived late and after meeting his true love at the lakeside. He was on edge. “Will you let me explain?” he seemed to exclaim as his mother mimed him for the zillionth time he must marry. Even more than Muntagirov, he felt without counsel and alone in the world. There is no tutor in this version; Siegfried does have Benno, but he’s a friend not an adviser. Benno knows no better what to do.
Clarke’s jumps were clear and distinct, the double cabrioles in his solo were two equal, discrete beats. Instead of the back-to-back double tours Muntagirov did, Clarke did a double tour to a second swirl in a low failli position; a stylish option.
He got good height and clarity in the coda, and we came to Osipova’s fouettés. She slammed through them with steely determination and placement you have never seen on a virtuoso turner. With her back crazily arched and her arms like broken wings, she looked like an incorrectly trussed rotisserie chicken. By rights with that form she shouldn’t have made five turns. She made it all the way including a finish. That, my friends, is Beast Mode. After her deception she rejoiced with her co-conspirator Von Rothbart, and led the black swans who appeared in their mockery of Siegfried and the Queen.
Amidst Scarlett’s geometric formations in Act 4, Osipova raced out lamenting and flapping, She frantically mimed how Siegfried swore unfaithfully, that all was lost and that she must die. All of her younger desire to suffer onstage was before us multi-fold, and it was huge. Her mime was delivered like someone hyperventilating from crying during an argument, racing away from Siegfried and making him pursue her. She finally relented telling him sorrowfully, “You swore.” He bowed low before her; she sadly bade him rise. And there we all are, at the moment the young Osipova wished for and had been fulfilled many times:
“I have to die.”
That mime was the apex of her death scene. She ran up to the cliff, jumped on to whatever mattress was waiting for her, and we didn’t see her again until the bows. Von Rothbart got a longer, onstage death.
But the one who was most deeply shortchanged by Scarlett’s ending was Siegfried. Von Rothbart somehow knocked him senseless and he lay unconscious at the front of the stage through both deaths. Having a main character passed out onstage while the action goes on without them is never a good idea; look at Mark Morris’ “The Hard Nut” where Marie is in the same bad situation while Drosselmeier and his nephew ignore her. It robbed Siegfried of all the agency he had been struggling to develop throughout the ballet.
Clarke made what he could of a bad ending, acting as if he was trying to figure out what happened until he found and recovered Odette’s body, finally transformed back into a woman (and played by a body double – Osipova came out for her bows in her swan tutu).
In some ways, there is no more Osipova experience than Osipova in Beast Mode. But Beast Mode or no, the older Osipova can feel more and more as if she’s working in a vacuum. She she needs a partner of her stature who can influence her as much as she affects him. Her remove is also the product of being a Bolshoi-trained dancer at The Royal Ballet. In front of the corps on opening night, Yasmine Naghdi felt as if she led and represented the logical summation of their work and effort. Osipova felt completely sui generis: like an esteemed guest.
copyright © 2022 by Leigh Witchel
“Swan Lake” – The Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House, London
March 3, 2022
Cover: Natalia Osipova in “Swan Lake.” Photo: Bill Cooper.
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