“Ballet is woman,” George Balanchine definitively declared—and certainly more than once.
Matthew Bourne has other ideas. He tried them out with great and deserved success in 1995 when he took hold of the Lev Ivanov-Marius Petipa Swan Lake and demonstrated that ballet could just as easily and liltingly be man. Rather than ballet being choreographed for women backwards and in toe shoes (substituting for high heels), he forthrightly proved it could also be danced by men forward and in bare feet.
He examined the theory by transforming the famous swan queen into a man (Adam Cooper then) as tempter to a dissatisfied prince (Scott Ambler then). He morphed the 14 cygnets as well. In doing so, he introduced another strong element that was, without question, homoerotic but, even more suggestively, could be interpreted as a metaphor for self-loathing homophobia.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★ review here.]
And although Bourne has directed and choreographed several outstanding works since for his dance company (originally-called Adventures in Motion Pictures), he now brings his signature piece—with its unchanged Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky score—back to City Center in a pristine version which is as effective as it was 25 years ago. (Never forget that in 1999 Bourne won Tonys for best direction and best choreography and seemed unusually startled when picking up these Swan Lake awards.)
In transforming Swan Lake, Bourne implies—and forcibly—that the Prince, very much under his mother’s control, has homosexual longings. The first hint—if not the opening image of him dreaming of a male swan—is at an act-one public event: the unveiling of a muscular male statue that the Prince indicates he’d like to have a longer ogle at.
The Prince’s desire is compounded, of course, when leaving all the excitingly crafted court pomp and other peregrinations behind—as well as his mother (Nicole Kabera at the performance I saw, initially carrying an Elizabeth II-like handbag). He wanders to a lake and encounters the seductive swan and her insistent companions.
That’s the male ensemble, all bare-chested and wearing feathered knickers that set and costume designer Lez Brotherston has conjured. The Prince’s impulses are only exacerbated at a second-act royal ball when a louche Stranger (also Ball) appears in black and makes a play for both the Queen and her sexuality-challenged son.
Needless to say, Bourne retains the familiar Swan Lake outlines, but his changes do make for a tale that could be read as the Swan representing the Prince’s attempting to deal with repressed gay longings, even temporarily acceding to them in the central pas de deux but ultimately, in a tragic denouement, unable to accept them.
Okay, it’s just a thought. About his inspired notion, Bourne isn’t on record (as far as I know) discussing it from this perspective. He does say in a 1998 Village Voice interview, “Initially, [my Swan Lake] was a whim—wouldn’t it look good with males? Then when I thought, Let’s actually look at this seriously, the more I looked at it, the more it seemed right. Because of the way a swan actually is when you watch it—its wingspan. It’s very much more like a male dancer’s musculature than a female’s. The strength of a swan, the power, the violence erupted—all those things seemed more male to me.”
And yes, his inklings are, uh, borne out—and definitely when the cygnets turn quite violent in a final sequence that takes place where the action began, in the Prince’s bedroom. At many other times Bourne has the swans fold their right arm over their head, as if shielding themselves with a wing. He even indulges in some appropriately juvenile humor when he revises the beloved cygnet quartet.
For the current run, Matthew Ball, Will Bozier, and Max Westwell dance the Swan—Ball at the performance I saw—and James Lovell or Tom Broderick dance the Prince (Lovell at the performance I saw). Ball and Lovell prove to be dancers with deeply honed acting skills. They perform with their questioning eyes as much as with their lithe arms, torsos and legs. As the Swan, Ball is commanding and delicately masculine. As the Stranger, Ball is off-handedly decadent. Throughout, Lovell conveys the Prince’s debilitating anguish.
Although Bourne handily proves his point that ballet is man, he doesn’t jettison woman. During the first act, he has the entire ensemble—men and women—present and crisply active. The Queen (Katrina Lyndon alternating at other performances) remains inflexibly imperious. There’s also a Girl Friend (I saw Freya Field, not Katrina Lyndon or Carrie Willis), who, more precisely, would like to be the Prince’s girlfriend but isn’t. She’s too cheap to win over the Queen and too not-a-bloke to win over the Prince.
The female dancers get to be foxy in a first-act segment at a seedy boite called “Swank Bar” (notice that “Swank” includes the word “Swan”). In act two, they get to strut their stuff—with escorts—as princesses from seven European countries perhaps trying to wow the Prince.
All the same, this Swan Lake is, as James Brown might have said, a man’s man’s man’s world. Where ballet is concerned, it makes its own powerful argument for #MeToo.
Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake opened January 30, 2020 , at City Center and runs through February 9. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
