Now that in the latest Dior collection also Maria Grazia Chiuri has wrapped the neckline of a peplum with a sinuous Swan as in the famous photo by Anna Pavlova, the confirmation is definitive: the Swan is and will forever be in the modern imagination, synonymous with grace emaciated of the “dancer”, which Pavlova herself, thanks to her worldwide fame, helped to impress.
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Such and such is in fact the assimilation with the first interpreter who danced it, even on her deathbed, that it overlooks the extraordinary innovative strength of that dance. Yet The Death of the Swan by the Russian Michel Fokine created at the dawn of the twentieth century, on the three minutes of the andantino of Saint Saens announces the need to investigate emotions and impulses of modern man, giving space to interiority, including fragility: something extremely different from the fabulous Swans of the Lake, about ten years older, the last bastions of Petipa’s astral classicism, barely warmed by the languors of his assistant Lev Ivanov, but above all by the turbulent beauty of Tchaikovsky’s music.
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Nevertheless, often confusing them, the Swans now represent classical dance and its aesthetics for everyone. And never as in these times – thanks to the global lockdown that has literally clipped the wings of dancers from all over the world – have they been evoked as symbols of a noble and suffering art: we have seen them dance in the living rooms and in the bathtubs. in videos often designed to raise awareness of the crisis in the sector.
The Tchaikovsky swans
Beyond the pandemic, it is however undeniable that both the Tchaikovsky swans and the feeble Fokinian creature represent a real challenge among those dance artists of today who boast the recognition of their originality and never populate as in this summer of shooting. many Italian festivals, which show us that sooner or later an artist has to deal with the tradition to which he belongs in spite of everything.
Swan Lake
The French Academician Angelin Preljocaj has long started a “backward” process, which led him from a pure choreographer to review the world of Petipa. But in his Lac de Cygnes (Italian premiere at the Festival dei Due Mondi from 9 to 11 July), the challenge was not so much compositional as dramaturgical, given that as a fervent ecologist the author contextualized the story in a contemporary metropolis where the struggle for natural resources collides with economic interests. We know that the plot of Swan Lake has been subject to countless reinterpretations since the 1970s: the prince has been assimilated to Ludwig of Bavaria, Hamlet, even Charles Windsor.