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What are you doing this evening?

Swan Lake was the first ballet I ever saw, apart from a rather ill-understood experience of Don Quixote in Moscow on a programmed trip of Moscow & the then Leningrad arranged by Intourist (the state tourist agency of communist Russia – Gorbachev was President then). I wrote about it in a much earlier blog available at this link: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/03/11/a-blog-steven-the-ballet-virgin-visits-birmingham-royal-ballet-performing-tchaikovskys-swan-lake-at-the-sunderland-empire-on-the-10th-of-march-2023-2-00-p-m-performance/

Just compare the scenes pictured from the Birmingham Ballet version I saw below from that blog with the advertising for Bourne’s version – it is a rescreening, of course, of the Bourne production. The difference is obvious. The swan corps de ballet and principals that were danced by ballerinas in the original are male dancers in Bourne.

There is a useful summary of the sexual politics of the Bourne version (and the changes made to the story and score in the loner piece at this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_Lake_(Bourne)) quoted below:

The heroine, the swan princess Odette, is portrayed as powerless but lovely in accordance with conventional gender roles, and her hero is portrayed as a hunter who alone has the power to save her. Having a man in the role of lead Swan suggests that the Prince’s struggle has repressed gay love at its core, and changes the realm of the plot from magical to psychological. The fierce, bird-like choreography given to the swan corps re-interprets the archetype of the swan as a pretty, feminine bird of gentle grace. According to Bourne, “The idea of a male swan makes complete sense to me. The strength, the beauty, the enormous wingspan of these creatures suggests to the musculature of a male dancer more readily than a ballerina in her white tutu.”^[1]

However, the same central themes carry through both works. Both are about doomed, forbidden love, and both feature a Prince who wishes to transcend the boundaries of everyday convention through that love. Both themes have strong ties to the life of Tchaikovsky, the ballet’s composer, whose homosexuality caused a number of complications in his life.

That sexual politics is in fact referenced in the film of Billy Elliot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Elliot). I remembered the scene referenced as I read that fact in a Wikipedia piece on the Bourne version and a lot about the ending of  Billy Elliot became much clearer; its sexual politics more evident in a film that rather played down that element in the interests of a Julie Walters vehicle. Of course a point remains about whether the powerlessness portrayed in Odette could not be addressed while maintaining the heterosexual plot and a female dancer in that lead. However, to answer that question a lot of issues regarding the history of heteronormative cultures would need to be addressed. I wonder what Tchaikovsky would have thought; whether he felt that the gap between his own sexual being, as he knew it, and the content of traditional art forms could ever be bridged, let alone closed?

Will report in a blog another day.

Love

Steve