The career of Karen Kain, CC OOnt, director of the National Ballet of Canada, started out in a fairly conventional way: study at the National Ballet School beginning at age 11 then joining the National Ballet upon graduation. From there, however, she had more than ordinary: Rudolf Nureyev chose her to be his protégé, and her career took her to performances all over the world, from the Bolshoi to the Vienna State Opera Ballet to the Ballet National de Marseilles. Nureyev also brought her to a party where she caught the eye of Andy Warhol, who later painted her portrait.
The through-line in Swan Song is preparation of Kain’s production of Swan Lake, which is trying something different: to get past several centuries of the male gaze and offer up a more feminist version of the story. She knows she’s taking a risk: dancers are trained in certain ways, ballet companies depend on patronage from people who may prefer productions that feel familiar, and women who dare are often punished for it. Still, if Matthew Bourne could stage an all-male version of Swan Lake to great acclaim, you’d think people would be up for a re-imagining that’s much less radical, but there are no guarantees of fairness in the arts world.
Swan Song includes a lot of rehearsal, plus a lot of discussions about what it means to be in a ballet company and all the different things involved in making a production successful. Those wigs don’t just design themselves, folks, and the costumes have to not only have to support the director’s vision of the production, but also be comfortable to dance in. Anyone who’s ever been involved in ballet, even if it was just lessons as a kid, will eat this material up, as will anyone interested in the process of creating an artistic work. You also get to see some of the final result as well, in the form of footage from the premiere of this production.
You don’t have to have an interest in ballet to relate to Swan Song, however, because lots of the discussions will resonate far beyond the orders of that art. First off, there’s the racism that describes ballet dancers as white, and the resulting costume conventions, like requiring everyone to wear “flesh color” tights that are a sort of pink resembling white skin, no matter their natural skin tone. As one dancer says, and I’m paraphrasing, we want to honor tradition, but racism isn’t a tradition that should be honored. There’s also the wear and tear ballet exerts on a dancer’s body and psyche, and the need to balance the books of an arts organization while remaining true to the requirements of art.
Even if you think you don’t know anything about ballet, you probably do know something about Swan Lake, which makes this film more approachable for non-balletomanes. If you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan you have at least an idea what this ballet is about and why it’s such a big deal, while Tchaikovsky’s music is heard everywhere from the openings of the Universal Pictures horror films Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) to Billy Elliot (which references the Bourne production) and The Muppet Show. | Sarah Boslaugh
Swan Song is distributed on DVD by Kino Lorber.
