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Swan Lake, so second hand, on TV, in Darwin, yet even still, there are tears rolling down my face as the final act resonates. From beginning to end this ballet is a grand romantic gesture reconfigured with Murphy’s grand contemporary choreography.
This interpretation dips its hat to all the traditional swells of movement, shades of costume and setting that inform the tradition of Swan Lake right up until the industrially minimalist end.
The final act is everything the music promises. It shows us the frenetic flailing of a failing love affair that tears itself apart shred by shred until true love stuns us in the shape of Odette’s final grande jete that stops dead in mid air, arms, legs, horizontal in Friedrich’s arms as the lovers are resolutely united in a romantic inevitability that allows for breast heaving aplenty.
The stuff of ballet and opera! The grand gesture! The great welling sorrows and triumphs that aren’t supposed to be there anymore. Loved it – even second hand.
Yartz blogging straight from the heart — the best kind! Don’t apologise re. the second-hand aspect: just keep it up.
Sounds like a pretty good version of the hoary old classic. It’s a great story and a damn good ballet. But over the years the original IP been somewhat damaged by over familiarity with hit tunes overworked for ad soundtracks and ballet companies treating it as a talent showcase full of heavily framed set pieces first instead of as an organically flowing narrative.
Sounds like Murphy took the latter approach. Although I note from the image you’ve provided that it appears the blokes get to look suave while the dames are still stuck with those sugar plum fairy costumes. There’s no reason why a flapper dress can’t be engineered to withstand contemporary terpsichorean rigours.
Also, why the hell don’t ballet companies just hire taller dancers instead of getting short ones to stand on tipptytoe all the time?
*rimshot*
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week. Like the veal.
PS: This is one of the main reasons I really like a bit of hot ballet. Never mind the technique, feel the moves. And I met Darcy Bussell once (for about 30 seconds at some pissup at Somerset House) and she’s even more gorgeous in real life, and with a definite twinkle in her
thigheye.Now I think about it, perhaps Graeme Murphy could do a Sylvia. Keep some of Fred Ashton’s best moves but transmute it to a Fred Williams/John Olsen kinda Australian landscape. With bonus wild pig shooting.
It’s basically a raucous sexy pastoral after all.
…..funny you should mention it – , thrown back on my own resources while Ken is living it up at a university or two interstate, it is to the ‘raucous pastoral’ I have turned. Futz is a play about a man’s love for a pig. As far as I can glean ( mostly from a marvelous chat with the lady at the box office) it is an Animal Farmish beastialised Babe. Looks like Ken will be picking the straw out of my hair upon his return.
Flappers not swans! Surely you jest.