Sporadically speaking

In the midst of spec-ing up a new build today (having put together one spec from one supplier that should go the distance, tomorrow I'll see about coming up with one from another supplier for price comparison purposes) I took a break to watch Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake since it's one of those modern reworkings of classic ballets that seems to have more depth than the usual reviews give it. For the longest time I referred to it as 'Bad Gay Swan Lake' based mostly on having caught the ending late one night, possibly while drunk, and a tittering commentary from an acquaintance whose opinion on sexual orientation should plainly disqualify them for any psychiatric work. I'd presumed that anything that attracted that sort of attendance was probably gimmicky and not worth my time. Then some time ago, quite possibly because I mixed up Matthew Bourne and Michael Lucas in my Googling I ended up reading something of a summary of the ballet and discovered that it actually sounded rather intriguing.

Thus today I sat down to watch at least some of it. I missed a chunk towards the end because I had to deal with some phonecalls but luckily that was the section that was recapped in flashback when I came back. The plot of course wasn't the standard Swan Lake plot in it's usual variations and even with a scant summary gleaned from memory I wasn't entirely sure that I was quite following it all. It was like the show I attended on the weekend where one of the dancers was evidently telling a story with her performance but somehow I felt that I was missing bits and pieces here and there. But then when it comes to dance as storytelling I'm always much better at figuring it out if it involves puppets rather than people for some reason, quite possibly because a puppet only has a limited range of expression while with a human dancer there is so much that they can convey with every look or movement. This version of Swan Lake involved the suggestion of the entire swan malarkey being entirely in the prince's head or at least part of it may distinctly have been at the very end. It's the sort of plotline that I'd like to view again just to check my impressions and of course it would help if I watched it the whole way through, which may be possible some time this week since the Sky Arts channels seem to be fond of repeating something for a week if their showing of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary was anything to go by.

Apart from the overall plot I enjoyed the set piece in first half which was a parody of traditional ballet. The prince, his mother and entourage attend a ballet in one scene and while they are positioned to the side the ballet they watch takes centre stage. It was really wonderfully done, highlighting the tropes of classical ballet stories and performances, which are in fact the very things I watched while growing up. In fact there's a scene early on in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes featuring a Russian prima donna that sets the tone of it.

Of course what really warrants praise above everything else is the swan choreography. Unlike the traditional ballet where there's the suggestion of wings with a few token arm movements and little else other than suspension of disbelief and white tutus to cue the audience into the idea that the dancers are meant to be swans, what Matthew Bourne's version does is actually have the arm movements mimicking, admittedly with some concessions to artistic rendering, the actual movements of swan wings. The entire choreography very clearly demonstrates that the dancers are in the role of a flock of swans who can be vicious, engage in courtship dances and generally have their own set of regular behaviours. One of the most disturbing scenes in the ballet in fact involves the swans flocking and attacking the prince and then one of their fellows which really illustrates the fact that the traditional ballet is more about a fantasy of the behaviour of swans rather than the reality.

Overall, this modern rendition really is worth watching and certainly deserves all its praise for innovation. What it doesn't deserve is tittering comments about how it's oh so titillating that it's a gay version of Swan Lake: I'm not at all sure it is, especially with the sequence at the beginning which suggests that the prince's attachment to the swan may in fact all be in his own head. Of course the swan may represent various things so I'm not ruling the possibility out but it actually struck me as not at all clear cut and fairly ambiguous having watched it, especially since the final appearance of the swan involves him carrying the child version of the prince rather than the adult. Either way I don't think I'll stop being impressed at the strength of the male dancers any time soon: To maintain that sort of poise and elegance while they're very obviously soaked in sweat really does take dedication.