Derek Deane’s production of Swan Lake for English National Ballet is not especially noteworthy in terms of dance drama. What marks it out from other stagings of the 19th-century ballet is its scale. Configured for the vast auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall, it features no fewer than 60 swans. When they make their first entrance, wave after wave of them, it’s awesome. To see them move and breathe as one is also profoundly touching. Five dozen young women, refuting every generalisation about their generation – the petulant individualism, the zero attention span, the need for immediate gratification – and enacting a collective act of homage to this most rigorous of art forms.
The great ballet blanc set pieces – acts two and four of Swan Lake, the nocturnal act of Giselle, the Kingdom of the Shades scene in La Bayadère – were born of three 19th-century innovations: gas lighting, the white tulle ballet skirt and the pointe shoe. In combination, these enabled scenes suggestive of the supernatural, peopled by ethereally graceful figures. Today, when we knowingly deconstruct special effects even as we experience them, we read these scenes on two levels. As period dramas, subject to the willing suspension of disbelief, but also as the human dramas of the individual dancers in the present moment.
For those who consider classical dance elitist, the ballet blanc set pieces are the icing on a poisoned cake. Ballet, the argument goes, still reflects the hierarchies of its monarchical beginnings and ballet companies, with their strictly tiered ranking systems, are 18th-century courts in miniature. In the ballet blanc, these inequities are compounded by the reduction of the female corps to depersonalised, decorative figures. The Swedish choreographer Mats Ek once told me that he considered this use of dancers “obscene”. And that’s before one begins to reflect on the antique, Eurocentric conflation of whiteness with purity.
It’s a point of view. But watching Deane’s production, as I have many times, most recently last Sunday, it’s hard to feel anything other than deeply moved by the dedication of that swan corps. Far from being depersonalised, the dancers are made blazingly individual by the soaring risk of the event. You may be 17 years old, with heel blisters weeping inside your pointe shoes and your big toenail agonisingly detaching itself from its root, but if your gaze wavers or your line fractures, the ballet dissolves. Every one of the 60 knows that she is carrying the show.
Their inherent drama leaves the principal performances muted by contrast. Erina Takahashi’s Swan Queen is technically assured, with cool balances and assured turns, but she struggles to project to the upper reaches of the huge auditorium. As Siegfried, Yonah Acosta’s performance is perfunctory. He goes through the motions of dancing the role but remains detached from his colleagues and barely looks at Takahashi. It’s the memory of those swans that you take away with you. Radiant with self-belief, every shade of skin colour beneath their white tutus, transfixed with the importance of every move they make.
