Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is now in its 15th year and noticeably different from the show which first played at Sadler's Wells in 1995. Bourne is an obsessive tinkerer and in consequence the choreography's more sophisticated, the jokes are snappier and the satire is sharper than ever. The Swan is danced by Richard Winsor, a strong and alluring presence at the lakeside, but rather less believable as the viciously arrogant Stranger (no one, in my view, has ever bettered Adam Cooper in this role).
The Prince is Christopher Marney, who dances stylishly but tends to let his performance stray from pathos into petulance. The corps of swans, with their buzz cuts, feral stares and sculpted ivory torsos, is generally excellent, give or take the odd wobble in arabesque. They all pale, however, beside Nina Goldman's Queen, a self-adoring icicle in Dior couture whose emotional frigidity shrivels all around her. The merely vulgar, like Maddy Brennan's puffball-skirted Girlfriend, seem warm-hearted in comparison.
In fact, with the exception of the Prince – and him only part of the time – this production contains almost no sympathetic characters. We are locked in the hermetic, dog-eat-dog world of the court, where every smile is false. There's a scene just before the ball when we see the whole thing from the outside, from the point of view of the autograph hunters waiting in their homely scarves and anoraks for the celebrity guests (long-term fans will get the joke: Bourne was once just such an autograph hunter). But then, inevitably, we are hauled back into that claustrophobic interior.
Much has been made of the Prince's supposed sexual repression. But as this production makes clear, it's simple kindness rather than sexual opportunity that he's starved of. Offered the illusion of affection by the garish, on-the-make Girlfriend, and later by the narcissistic Stranger, he reaches for it with gauche desperation. But the court is a place from which love has been banished and with it decency, modesty and restraint. In that sense, it echoes the media-saturated world of Dorian Gray and the hostile suburb in which Edward Scissorhands meets his end.
And this, I think, is why the piece continues to resonate. Of course there's the emotional charge of the final tableau, still moving after repeated viewings. But on a more general level, Bourne's Swan Lake highlights one of the central dilemmas of our time: the impossibility of squaring the cult of individualism with love, which is essentially self-sacrificing. So while part of us empathises with Marney's Prince and his longing to lose himself in another human being, part of us finds him merely exasperating and identifies with Goldman's chic, self-centred Queen. She is, after all, worth it.
Boy Blue's hip-hop Pied Piper returns to the Barbican after opening there in March last year. Skill levels were always high, but choreographer Kenrick Sandy and director Ultz have tightened the previously sprawling narrative and pruned over-long dance numbers. The result is a family-friendly show which grabs you from curtain-up.
Sandy choreographs with wit and inventiveness, so the Asbo kids really do skulk and flit like rats and the Piper (Duwane Taylor) expresses his authoritarian nature through tensely linear locking sequences. There are jaw-dropping solos from the likes of Robert Anker and Lee Crowley, but the real joy of this production is the precision of its ensemble numbers, particularly the all-woman Nest of Vipers sequence. With Boy Blue at the Barbican, ZooNation at Southbank and whispers of a new Kate Prince show in the air, 2010 promises to be a big year for hip-hop dance.
