When Scottish Ballet premiered this production back in 2016, it was the first new Swan Lake their audiences had seen for twenty years and when the curtain went up on David Dawson’s production, there was a ripple of intrigue. Instead of the royal court and moonlit lakeside, we got John Otto’s almost-bare, purely abstract set that vaguely resembled the grey girders of Edinburgh’s Forth Bridge, and, later, a curvy line on the backcloth that just might be a distant lake. That was it. And a young man in a T-shirt looking out forlornly from downstage.
Dawson’s stripped-down production threw the impetus immediately on his choreography, whilst keeping the bones of the story clearly in sight. Siegfried (Bruno Micchiardi on this opening night in Glasgow) was a bit of a loner and, in the opening scene, clearly not enjoying the party being thrown by his best mate, Benno. Like Hamlet, he had of late lost all his mirth and not even Benno, despite his best efforts, could draw him into the fun. Which meant that for much of Act 1 Siegfried hovered about on the edge of the party, drawn into a half-hearted duet now and then with one of the girls, while the other guests – girls in bright frocks, T-shirts for the boys – caroused joyfully in solos and duets.
The design isn’t the only element Dawson and his team have up-ended. Some years ago a dance magazine featured a cartoon in which an Artistic Director is telling an aspiring dancer ‘No, you can’t be Benno, he doesn’t exist any more.’ Well, times have come full circle and in Dawson’s production the role is much expanded. At this performance, a supremely confident soloist Thomas Edwards pretty nearly stole the show in the two party scenes, showing off a bouncy technique and coping effortlessly with Dawson’s signature (and rather alarming) backward slides.
When the party moved on and Siegfried wandered by the lake, the evening really came alive with the entry of Odette. A programme note explained that ‘goddess-like, she is the swan queen Odette, replenishing her powers from the waters of the lake’. Deprived thus of both explanatory mime and an evil enchantment, Odette is both more mysterious and more commanding.
Returning as a guest artist to reprise a role she stamped her presence on eight years ago, Sophie Martin looked as if she’d never been away. Eerily radiant in the shimmering white-and-silver see-through skin that designer Yumiko Takeshima had given her, she appeared, from a distance, to be half-naked and thus truly half-human. Sinuous and elegant, stretching and melting, at once surrendering and dominating, she was all planes and angles and forever balances. As token of their mutual trust, she gave Siegfried a precious stone. By the time they meet again he had, of course, given it away to the glamorously black-suited Odile, borne in Carabosse-like by attendants to another of Benno’s parties at which Siegfried was – finally! – unleashed into some dashing choreography.
In Dawson’s neo-classical work, one movement flows naturally from another, but is often quirkily altered at the last second to subvert expectation: a head movement checked here, arms suddenly tweaked there. The nature of the swans here was suggested by upper body and arm-work, with hands that just hinted at the original choreography. And there’s hardly a straight corps-de-ballet line in the whole production. Even the swans shunned choreographic drilling in their lakeside scenes: like the party guests, they often seemed to be working individually. Which is not to say there was a lack of coordination (there were, after all, only ten swans) just that with something happening everywhere, it was simultaneously exhilarating and slightly distracting. But a modern tragedy, nevertheless, and by the end, when a young man is looking out forlornly from downstage once again, we had been moved in a way that velvet and feathers has not always managed.
