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Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Mute Swans - Glee, Swan Lake and what dance is for...

It’s fair to say I have a bit of a problem with musical drama.   I love them both on their own but it seems to me that when they’re combined you get something that’s less than the sum of its parts, the one distracting from the other.  It’s a very tough art form to get right and I think that most modern musicals don’t even try, just using the plot as an excuse to stitch together some popular songs that are guaranteed to put bums on seats.  I’d cite season one of Glee as an example of this, the first half was story driven and slotted songs seamlessly in, each song working as a performance on its own merits but also informing us about the characters and allowing them to develop.  The second half pretty much abandoned this formula by ‘themeing’ each episode around a particular artist and throwing away any notions of characterisation (note the way the characters seem to love each other one week and hate each other the next as the plot requires – there’s no continuity or overall dramatic arc).  I’d say the first half of the season was miles better than the second.
So it was with the usual trepidation that I went along to see the St Petersburg ballet company’s production of Swan Lake at the Royal Centre in Nottingham last week.  The story itself is a very simple one we’ve heard a hundred times before.  The usual affair of boy meets girl, girl turns into swan due to a curse that can only be broken by a declaration of love, evil wizard sends doppelganger of girl to Prince to trick him, Prince declares love to the wrong girl, girl dies and Prince dies of a broken heart.  Ok, so maybe not a hundred times before.  Still, it’s a thin tale to hang a couple of hours of theatre from.  And in fairness they don’t really try.  This is dance and it’s about the movement of the performers to the music.  If you want a complex plot, go and watch Chinatown.  The first act in each half takes place in a palace with a ball and this structural device allows various groups of people to enter, to do a ‘turn’ and then to stand around decorating the set while the next lot do their thing.  It’s a very effective device and if anything is less obtrusive than the sort of inexplicable bursting into song that you get in many musicals.  The other acts take place at the lake and allow the female members of the company to do their thing.  Again, the company did portray something of the elegance of the swans they represented and also a little of their fussiness. 
The ballet does save the best until last.  The fourth act is dramatically the most satisfying with a strong focus on the tragedy of the main story.  It also has the best tunes.  It builds up to the famous ‘dying swan’ routine and it was only seeing the Prince and Swan Princess dance together that really drew me into the story.  The contrast between the power and control of the male dancer and the grace and poise of the female dancer was wonderful to watch as the two of them moved as one, split, came back together and flowed around the stage.  It reminded me that, at the most wonderful or tragic moments in our lives, words are useless and that the only comfort is to hold someone close. I really felt at this point that I was seeing something that could be best conveyed in dance and that words, however well chosen, would only get in the way.
As a footnote, this bit of blogging has taken me much longer to write than I expected. I did feel for much of the evening as though I was watching a sport to which I didn’t know the rules.  It’s all very slickly done and you can appreciate the physical difficulty of what they’re doing but it’s hard to know which details of the performance are the telling ones.  It’s also hard to be drawn into the story.  I suppose I’m used to focusing on the verbal elements of plot and character with the performance just existing to serve those elements.  A ballet, of course, takes all that away for you.    I’ve gone through a number of drafts and with each one I’ve had to think again about what I saw and what I felt about it.  It’s made me reassess the ballet and made me appreciate it much more than I did at the time.  I still think I’m a long way from understanding the rules, but I think that I want to make the effort.  And that’s not a bad result for the St Petersburg ballet now is it?
David Millington.
Nottingham, 17th January 2011.

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