Et tu, tu tu? (ballet)

[KlondikeGeoff]

I recently watched an excellent DVD (from Netflix), Great Pas de Deux. It had some marvelous scenes from great performers at their peak.

Although I had not heard of the performance before, there was a scene from Swan Lake with not only the prince being a male dancer, but also Odette and all the swans. Leads were danced by Cooper and Ambler.

I believe myself to be open-minded, but I’ve got to admit that this was a tiny bit difficult to accept at first. Some part of my love of ballet is enjoying the beautiful ballerinas, but I have to admit, these two guys were so damn good that my wife and I were both fascinated. The set was outstanding too.

Has anybody seen this ballet in its entirety, in person or on film? What are your opinions. I don’t know if I could really take the entire story.

[Duck_Duck_Goose]

My understanding is that what you saw wasn’t really Swan Lake, at least not in the sense of the “classical ballet” version.

This is evidently what you saw:

Swan Lake became an unexpected popular hit when radical choreographer Matthew Bourne took Tchaikovsky’s traditional ballet by the scruff of the neck and reworked it with a myriad of modern influences and themes to astonishing effect. Seldom have the dark psychological riptides at the heart of so many classical ballets been so brilliantly exposed. The Prince (Scott Ambler) is a wretched and dissolute young man dominated by his mother, the Joan Collins-like Queen (Fiona Ambler). Shades of Tennessee Williams, indeed. Von Rothbart becomes a press secretary, more sinister eminence grise than hissable villain. Most startling of all, the Swan (Adam Cooper) is a muscular, emphatically masculine male.

Bourne has stressed the universality of his interpretation, which proved such a success for his Adventures in Motion Pictures dance company. And indeed this is never an overtly “gay” Swan Lake, although the electricity of the pas de deux at the height of Act 2 delivers a palpably homoerotic charge. Its universal threads–as Bourne suggests, the need to be held and understood is common to us all–are synthesized in the utterly moving conclusion as the Swan cradles the lifeless Prince and raises him to a better place. Swan Lake becomes a human, rather than simply romantic, tragedy. --Piers Ford

'Zat sound like what you saw? Universal threads being synthesized and all? Yeah, I can see where two hours of that might be a bit much.

Male dancers doing the ladies’ parts is nothing new–I refer you to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. That wonder of the world, Youtube, has a number of clips of them, doing Swan Lake, no less. Lovely stuff.

[Terminus_Est]

I’ve seen the male Swan Lake. I quite liked it. Some homoerotic subtext is unavoidable, but there’s nothing overt going on between the prince and the swan. Those swans are overtly, aggressively male, which is closer to what you’ll actually experience if you’re ever up close with a hissing, flapping, pecking swan defending its territory.

[Zsofia]

I saw about half of it on PBS once - it was really strikingly amazing.

[KlondikeGeoff]

[QUOTE=Duck Duck Goose]
’

Zat sound like what you saw? Universal threads being synthesized and all? Yeah, I can see where two hours of that might be a bit much.

That’s it, but what I saw was amazing. Thanks for quoting the review, it was edifying.

Male dancers doing the ladies’ parts is nothing new–I refer you to [url=http://www.trockadero.org/]Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.[/url

Oh yeah, I’ve seen them, and they are hilarious Really good and talented parodies, but the male Swan thing was dead serious. Worth the experiment, I guess.