Bossov Ballet Theatre - Vaganova Ballet Technique

Falling in Love Down at Swan Lake

by Félicité de La Villejégu

The ballet Swan Lake stands as the classical chef-d’oeuvre of romanticism and ballet’s grandeur, the enduring emblem of Russian ballet. Except for the American penchant for seeing The Nutcracker at Christmas time, no other ballet is better known, more popular or more loved.

Directed by Andrei Bossov, Act 2, the Lakeside Scene, will be performed by Bossov Ballet Theatre at the Williamson Center, 9 School Street, Fairfield, the performing arts center of Lawrence High School, Friday and Saturday, 29 and 30 July, at 7:00 P.M. each night. An ardent traditionalist, Bossov will adhere faithfully to the Ivanov choreography, stage sets, and costumes that launched the ballet 117 years ago. Following an intermission, the dancers will present a Ballet concert encompassing variations, pas de deux, and corps works staged by Bossov over the past fifteen years of the company’s history.

The great Tchaikovsky composed Swan Lake’s musical score, 1875-1876, for Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Austrian choreographer Julius Reisinger created the dance set to Tchaikovsky’s music and libretto and Bolshoi opened the new ballet, March 4th, 1877. It was not well received. The ballet world had yet to warm to Tchaikovsky’s music, still held by some choreographers and dancers to be “undanceable”. Some of the early attempts at costuming designed to turn ballerinas into swans on stage were best described as “ridiculous”. But Tchaikovsky persisted. It was 1890 when Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa collaborated to create The Sleeping Beauty when the two artists formed an informal partnership that would give us the three timeless classics, The Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, and finally, Swan Lake. In the long interim between the 1877 opening in Moscow and the 1895 St. Petersburg opening of the ballet as we now know it by the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, everything including costumes and libretto were re-worked. And yet another artist, Lev Ivanov, Petipa’s faithful assistant lent his talents to the choreography of Acts 2 and 4, while Petipa, himself, is credited as the creator of Acts 1 and 3.

The mystery of Swan Lake’s success lies not only in the beauty of the haunting choreography and music; but also in its profound poetic message and romantic inspiration, the psychological conflict in the characters whose destinies so subtly true to real life, hold the attention of any audience. From a psychological novella, an ancient German legend, the ballet was fashioned from Russian folk tales in which good and evil are in laconic and graphic contrast to each other. The mystery of Swan Lake is also perceptible within the intrinsic link between woman and swan. The myth of the ballerina-swan lends itself to a classic metaphor: the swan as the embodiment of femininity, miming the gesture of the woman’s grace – and fragility.

Swan Lake begins at a royal court. Prince Siegfried, heir to the kingdom, must declare he has chosen a wife at his birthday ball. The magnificent celebrations continue, while the Prince withdraws, longing to be alone. During the Second Act, Siegfried, upset that he cannot marry for love, makes for the forest and escapes into the night. He sees a flock of swans flying overhead and sets off in pursuit of them. Siegfried aims his crossbow at the swans and readies himself for their landing by the lakeside. When one comes into view, however, he stops. Before him is a beautiful creature dressed in white, more woman than swan. Enamored, the two dance and Siegfried learns that the swan maiden is the princess Odette. The sorcerer, von Rothbart, representing all that is worldly evil, has captured her and used his magic to turn her into a swan by day. Every night, she becomes a woman again. Once Siegfried knows her story, he takes great pity on her and falls in love. As he begins to swear his love to her, an act that will render the sorcerer's spell powerless, von Rothbart himself appears. Siegfried threatens to kill von Rothbart but Odette intercedes. If von Rothbart dies before the spell is broken, it can never be undone.

The fantastic theme in the original libretto of Swan Lake provided the motivation for a psychological drama involving a relationship between an earthly man of flesh and blood, and a magic fairy. That was a relationship between two different worlds: the real world of human beings, and the world of fairy tale nature and poetry. Swan Lake is a story ballet with real life emotions and passions where nothing is abstract or philosophically vague. The image of Odette, the heroine, an ideal incarnation of heavenly love tragically unattainable, was also in a way the last of such female images created by Tchaikovsky. This ballet may be the most personal of all the compositions he created in Moscow. It reflects faithfully as a mirror the various psychological nuances which colored the composer’s life in that period: his romantic passion, lyrical meditation and sincerity, as well as quests of happiness and its inevitable and terrible end.

Moreover, Swan Lake’s music is pervaded with an almost imperceptible premonition of change, sentimental dreams of happiness, and a fatalistic foreboding of a calamitous storm that would sweep old life away before the final purification of the soul.