The dancing lasts less than three minutes, but it’s just the fillip we need right now; a gem of a moment to pull focus in often otherwise blurry days. The Swan is a lockdown offering from Birmingham Royal Ballet. Relayed in split-screen, a pianist (Jonathan Higgins), cellist (António Novais) and dancer (Céline Gittens) – all in their separate homes – perform Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan, with a surprise ending.
The short solo, set to Saint-Saëns’ Le Cygne, was created in 1905 for the legendary ballerina Anna Pavlova, and it captures the ephemeral otherworldliness of the ballerina’s art, as well as ballet’s enduring image of the fluttering, beautifully doomed white swan.
There’s great intimacy in inviting an audience into your home, close enough to Gittens to see the seams of her tights. Just as well, this solo is all about the details: the barely moving bourrées set to a gentle simmer, the slightest acceleration or pause in the swoop of her arms, the engrossing undulations of shoulder blades. There’s a single moment of melodrama when an arm is flung to the floor and Gittens looks like a silent-movie heroine.
A choreographic intervention by BRB director Carlos Acosta means this is no longer a dying swan but one who, in the final moments, raises her head, hand and heart in hope. It sounds cheesy, but it’s lovely. When a dancer herself is transported, so can we be, too.
There’s something pleasantly jarring about the combination of sublime art and prosaic domestic details – radiator, light switch, the pot plant Gittens brushes past as she dances into frame. This collision of the ordinary and the exceptional, the magical and mundane, brings human connection and fantastical escapism all in the space of 165 seconds.
