Citizen Swan
Why ballet is less conservative than people think

Shirley Dent
posted 25 January 2007

The storm in a tutu over English National Ballet principal dancer Simone Clarke's membership of the BNP has inspired the Socialist Worker to put its thruppence-worth in about the state of dance today.

In an article somewhat mysteriously titled 'Resolving the political contradictions of choreography', Despina Mavrou argues that 'If all art is political, then ballet tends to fall at the conservative end of the scale - both in terms of storylines and in its aesthetics. Women are typically portrayed as weightless, fairylike creatures, while men play the strong characters that perform all the high jumps, lifting up their female partners. In contrast, contemporary dance - itself a broad term - has produced countless exciting, interesting artists and works in the past century or so since its birth.'

The double-whammy daftness of this assertion would have been blatantly obvious to even a penguin watching the Swan Lake double-bill (a performance and a documentary, The Magic of Swan Lake) on Sunday, part of the BBC's Tchaikovsky Experience season. Let's deal with the 'all art is politics' codswallop first of all. I'll personally book out an entire box at the Royal Opera House - for whatever performance and with full champagne hamper thrown in - to the first person who can convincingly dig out for me the contemporary politics in the Swan Lake story. Here's a recap to get you started: a princess is turned into a swan by an evil magician - the swan bit, as we are informed by Katherine Holabird author of Angelina Ballerina, possibly inspired by the swan-carts Tchaikovsky's nephews and nieces rode; the same said swan falls in love with a prince who almost shoots her; this prince, having declared his undying love for the swan queen, then goes and gets himself tricked by the daughter of the evil magician (who looks exactly like swan number one) into falling for her. The West Wing en pointe? No, I'm not quite getting it either.

But what you do get from the Kirov Ballet production of Swan Lake - even if you agree with some of the criticisms that Ulyana Lopatkina interpretation of the duel Odette/Odille role is too 'marblesque' and unemotional in its technical perfection - is the sheer energy, thrill, strength and authority of female dancers who are the crème de la crème of classical ballet. It is entirely missing the point, ignorant and plainly untrue to make an 'on your side sister' comment about classical ballet only having strong roles for male dancers when we have available for all to view the sight of Lopatkina absolutely nailing the notorious 32 fouettes at the end of act III. This 'party piece', introduced to Marius Petipa's choreography by the dancer Pierina Legnani, is a dazzling and dizzying feat of technique and strength (showing off basically) that is the pinnacle of achievement for every dancer tackling the role - the illusion of 'fairy-like' weightlessness is one that is only achieved by the strongest, best-trained and talented dancers and they rightfully command the stage when displaying their skill. As Darcey Bussell puts it in The Magic of Swan Lake, 'everything we work for is in this ballet'.

Watching the Kirov company at work on the Mariinsky stage, also makes me ponder the painting-by-numbers approach to conservative art by those who wish to parade their radical credentials, classical dance unwittingly providing so much in the faux-radical's palette of what conservative means. I am a fan of all good dance, whether that be experimental and what roughly equates to contemporary, or the weighted-by-tradition classical repertoire. What I cannot stand, however, is the casually dismissive use of 'conservative', as though it is somehow less exciting and less thought-provoking to have a dramatic narrative than an abstract concept, or classic technique is somehow more 'repressive' and less 'progressive' than, say, capoeira.

One thing those wanting to knock the tutus and relevés of classical ballet always seem to miss is that if you want to talk collective rather than conservative, than the major works of classical ballet are the most collective of artistic projects. From Tchaikovsky's score, which Darcey Bussell describes as doing 'wonderful things for a dancer… it drives you on and on burning a hole in the stage' to the breathtaking ensemble effort of the corps de ballet, a mass moving as one, no one person could accomplish the achievement of Swan Lake.

I think the corps is a particularly thorny issue for the contemporary=radical, classical=conservative school of thought and one that rather shows up their argument. The dance critic Judith Mackrell describes the still shots of the corps as being akin to 'Busby Berkeley en pointe' but goes on to describe the peculiarly expressive quality that the corps moving as one has. She is absolutely right. Makhar Vasiev, director of ballet at the Mariinsky describes the importance of the corps de ballet in Swan Lake: 'The women's corps de ballet is the biggest star in this theatre… it has to be a single ensemble. In this theatre, tradition is the most important thing because it is a living process… All the dancers have different abilities and talents but we have to unify them.' Ironically, it is this core ideal at the heart of classical ballet, the giving over of individual talent into something that transcends the individual, that many who call themselves radical in both art and politics seem to have given up on.