A young prince is celebrates his coming of age and, on his auspicious day, breaks free from his dominant mother to travel the world. He carries with him a love for a mystical white swan he encountered one night at a lake – Swan Lake.
During his travels he meets a black swan, seemingly identical to the white one, yet somehow different. In fact she is the result of a spell cast by the evil sorcerer Rothbart. The prince falls Rothbart’s trap, professing his lover for the black swan. He is enchanted, then horror stricken upon realizing that she is not who he thinks she is. But perhaps they are two sides of the same being? Perhaps the fable revolves around ideals contra reality.
The prince flees back to his lake and there, among the creatures by the water, searches longingly for his white swan, now lost to him. Realizing she is gone, he is faced with a new beginning, a choice to live or to die.
When Mats Ek talks about Swan Lake – he firstly speaks of Tchaikovsky’s music, which he considers to be the most important reason why the work survived.
“It has been said that Tchaikovsky’s music is like flowers, but unlike their seeds,” Ek says. “Those flowers are rooted in great sorrow, a longing, and conversely in a wild and almost desperate glee. This combines to make the flowers seductive and dangerous.”
A perennial outsider, Tchaikovsky suffered a great deal of internal turmoil. Gay in a society where being so risked a death sentence, he lived unhappily for a time in a marriage of convenience with one of his students. Then a relationship was constructed with an elderly woman who lived in another country. They never met.
In creating Swan Lake, Mats Ek returned once again to the reconception of a classical ballet. As with his previous interpretations of classics he did so with deft craftsmanship, great rigor, and a touch of obstinance. That final quality is something he insists is not intended as a polemic against or negation of the original ballets. Instead, he wishes to explore the emotional complexity and dramatic potentials that can be found in the original stories or expressions particular to a given era.
In Giselle, the almost diametrical contrasts between the two acts gave rise to a depiction of social difference as well as the many faces of love. In Swan Lake it is, above all, the music that inspires an expression to unfold inside the given framework of the existing narrative:
“The story with the prince, the black and the white swan, the mother and the magician is quite unclear,” says Ek. “In different versions of the performance, it often ends differently – everyone drowns, or the prince gets away with a mere fright or the sorcerer is defeated, and in becomes a happy ending.”
In Mats Ek’s version, Swan Lake becomes a story about human growth through encounter with hardship, about a schism that too difficult to be bear. The prince is appalled by the world he encounters on his travels, a world that threatens his dream of purity. He seeks refuge, an inner exile at the shores of his swan lake, perhaps a point of departure for renewal. Among the wild creatures there he might find a new beginning.Tchaikovsky’s own misfortune and his longing to break free from a life forced upon him is a recurrent theme in the music and, perhaps unconsciously, in the story of the young prince too.
Marie-Louise Ekman, in her eighth collaboration with Ek, designed the sets.
Music:
Peter Tchaikovsky: Opus 20
The Grand Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio and TV
Conductor: Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
and Jewish folk music