And so, at moments they seemed to be trapped in a Disney fairy tale-the blonde princess with her pretty prince.
Where he doesn’t reach beyond the chiselled geometry of his dance to seize its poetic heart, she can’t go beyond her instinctive fragility to make the ballet full. Her line freezes where it should sing, Odile’s variation ends early and the double attitude turns and fouettés are haphazard. But she doesn’t yet have the technical command to shape the momentary effects she makes into a sustained narrative arc. It is a moment of surrender and trust and when the heroic stretch of Baulac’s neck softens into a gentle murmur the effect is quite lovely. There is one moment where Odette stretching into arabesque reaches into the distance across Siegfried’s shoulder. In the white adagio especially she is present, spontaneous. In another theatre and in another production that would be enough but not here where Siegfried, like Odette-Odile, carries the weight of personal and mythical history.īaulac does, in short spurts, make us care. We admire his dancing without really caring for Siegfried. Louvet is a beautiful dancer – he has the French taste for eloquent footwork, soft arms and princely lines – but it is an opaque kind of beauty, a surface elegance that has none of the dark turbulence that animates this version. On Tuesday (19th), the idea remained largely at the level of form, mostly because Leonore Baulac and Germain Louvet are not the most ideal of interpreters. Leonore Baulac in Swan Lake Photo Julien Benhamou The problem though is that a translational gap exists between this Freudian framing and Nureyev’s actual choreography that can only be bridged by its interpreters. In a way, Nureyev’s fascination with the fluid slippages of gender, with the male to male dynamic between Siegfried and Rothbart seems rather in tune with our post binary world.
Siegfried is human and Odette, in a sense, is merely phantasmic. As Anna Kisselgolf wrote in a July 1986 review ‘Odette makes her entrances and exits from this drawing room of the mind – or rather from its apertures.’ It his mind, with its tortured refrains, that is the setting for the myth. In Rudolf Nureyev’s Swan Lake, there is no literal lakeside, only the restless enclave of Siegfried’s psyche.
February 19 (Baluac/Louvet/Alu) & 20 (Gilbert/Marchand/Docquir), 2019
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