A Classic Pairing of Swan and Suitor
"And what might your name be?" the flirtatious Irina Dvorovenko as Odette seemed to ask David Hallberg's von Rothbart on Monday night in the brief Prologue Kevin McKenzie has inserted in American Ballet Theatre's "Swan Lake." Mr. McKenzie staged this production for the company in 2000 and it returned to the company's repertory this week. Mr. McKenzie's purpose here is to provide an explanation for how the princess Odette first falls under the spell of sorcerer von Rothbart. After this scene, we next see the sorrowful Odette trapped in her swan incarnation, until Prince Siegfried appears, and begins his quest for her salvation. And this is where Ms. Dvorovenko and her husband and frequent partner, Maxim Beloserkovsky, as the Prince, resumed their "Swan Lake" collaboration.
This time, Ms. Dvorovenko's White Swan did not match her performance last year, when she had successfully reversed her innate polarities. On Monday night, her allegro temperament resisted massaging, and she was too dry and finite too much of the time. She expanded into climactic poses and movements, but too often simply prolonged lines and poses rather than radiating them expressively. She was better as Odile, the Black Swan, the counterfeit whom Rothbart employs to deter Siegfried from remaining true to Odette. Ms. Dvorovenko piloted a steady and dynamic course beginning with the come-hither look she flashed at the Prince and ending with her hammered-out fouetté turns in the Coda.
Mr. Beloserkovsky's Siegfried showed him at his best. He was properly full of himself in his first entrance, and in the first act his dancing made a persuasive case for Mr. McKenzie's melancholy solo, a holdover from the 1960s. These were the years when choreographers and star danseurs decided that princely roles needed to be bulked out, and that they needed to show that men could dance slowly and softly as well as fast and percussively. Mr. Beloserkovsky gave a creamy account of this adagio passage without suggesting that he was auditioning for the ballerina lead. In the Black Swan pas de deux, Mr. Beloserkovsky's technical stamina didn't flag the way it sometimes does; he stayed on top of technique all the way through to the conclusion of the coda.
Mr. McKenzie has also constructed an expanded role for von Rothbart, who is bifurcated into his own dual. Mr. Hallberg was the ballroom-worthy rake and Isaac Stappas the ogre. Mr. Hallberg's von Rothbart dances an adagio solo in the ballroom that is a kind of pendant to Siegfried's Act 1 solo. Von Rothbart balances in relevé and then slowly raises his leg into arabesque. Other dancers have nailed this sequence more brazenly, but Mr. Hallberg's finesse coupled with his glam rock glares did justice to Mr. McKenzie's conception.
As ABT moves into the final weeks of his two-month Met season, the company showed its fatigue, but also some very good dancing. The first act Pas de Trois was danced by Yuriko Kajiya, Sarah Lane, and Sascha Radetsky, who positioned this gruelingly difficult display piece on the classical side of the fence, rather than, as we see often in "Swan Lake," turning it into barbaric execution.
Class conflict, as much as dualistic identities and Odette's own travails, is the subject of Mr. McKenzie's production. The Prince's birthday celebration is a bacchanalia. Everyone is on the make, and when peasants and aristocrats aren't propositioning each other, the peasants get drunk and rowdy and suggest that they might stage a raid on the palace. Further usurpation of royal prerogatives is suggested when von Rothbart dares to plant himself on the Queen Mother's throne in the Black Swan ballroom scene. This kind of license, whether offstage or on, would have been anathema in Tsarist Russia, where "Swan Lake" was first created in the twilight of the Romanovs's multi-centuried domination. Mr. McKenzie wants to make "Swan Lake" speak of and to another time and society. Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes one feels that the best productions are the ones that remain heedless to revisionism.
Until June 30 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).
