Swan Lake Different Yet (Ballet and Swan Lake in Popular Culture, Vol. 3 [?])

As I was browsing the internet, hoping to find a hip hop remix of Swan Lake to use at the upcoming final presentation of my project, i stumbled upon two reggae-ish versions: The first, a reggae rendering of the theme, was recorded in 1968 by a British band called The Cats (it seems they were from Brixton — though this information is from a questionable source). The second — similar, but with a stronger two tone sound — was released some eleven years later by Madness from London on their debut album One Step Beyond… .

The Cats - Swan Lake (Trojan, 1968)

Madness - Swan Lake
(Footage from Joe Massot’s 1981 Documentary Dance Craze)

Oh, and yes, I am aware of the classic Blackalicious track Swan Lake produced by DJ Shadow and Chief Xcel. But while it actually did sample Tchaikovsky’s music — it is too subtle to be immediately recognised as such.

Blackalicious - Swan Lake (Solesides, 1994)

Ballet and Swan Lake in Popular Culture Vol. 2

Swan Lake in animated films…:

Clip from Karo Yabuki’s Sekai Meisaku Douwa - Hakuchou no Mizuumi (Swan Lake), (Japan, 1981)

Opening from the same film dubbed in English

Opening scene from Richard Rich’s The Swan Princess (USA, 1994)

Trailer for Owen Hurley’s Barbie of Swan Lake (USA, 2003)

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…and comic strips:
In 1998 Tachibana Higuchi created a manga with the title Swan Lake. You will find it for download at dragonvoice.org and a review at sunny side up.

Ballet and Swan Lake in Popular Culture Vol. 1 1/2

As the example of Kerli showed, Swan Lake — and ballet in general, for that matter — is still present in popular culture. And because I am fascinated by the various forms this presence can take on, I decided to compile some of the ways in which ballet and Swan Lake have appeared in popular culture. A few music videos…:

Labutí píseň - Jiří Suchý, Vlasta Kahovcová, TOČR, Karel Krautgartner (Czechoslovakia, 196?)

Toni Basil - Mickey (on the Kenny Everett Video Show) (USA, 1982)

Ballet Dancer - The Twins (Germany, 1983)

A Space Dedicated to Writing

I’m a firm believer in having dedicated workspaces… If you’re trying to write (a paper, book, script, essay etc.) you should have a space — an office, corner, desk, nook, bed, bench, train compartment or tree house — dedicated solely to this purpose. A space where all other activity will be forbidden. Take your computer, nostalgic typewriter or Moleskine notebook to this space, disconnect from Skype, iChat, AOL, MSN and Adium, log-out of Facebook, MySpace and aSmallWorld, turn off your iPhone, Blackberry or regular-ass cell phone, allow the world to miss you — you could even be really brave and disconnect from the internet altogether if it isn’t essential to your research. There you go — now you’re ready.

As for my theory paper — I have found my own little secluded spot to write it in: the Swiss Institute for Art Research’s library, a quiet place with plenty of good books to research in is located in the basement of an old mansion in Zurich’s fancy Seefeld. Don’t look for me.

Possibly The First Dance Photograph Ever Made

Unknown Dancer by an anonymous American daguerreotypist, c.1849. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

William A. Ewing about the image (in Ewing 1987: The Fugitive Gesture):

Even straightforward daguerroeotype portraits of dancers are extremely rare. Neither the Paris Opéra nor Dance Collection of the New York Public Library has a single example in their immense holdings. It was astonishing to find, therefore, in the archives at George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York, not only a daguerreotype of a dancer (unfortunately unidentified), but a depiction of a simple step. Even though the exposure time must have been a minute or even longer, the image has undeniable vitality and none of the wooden quality we have learned to expect as the nineteenth-century norm. Surprisingly, what may be the earliest known photograph of the dance is a delight to the eye. Unfortunately, we cannot acknowledge its creator, who remains anonymous.” (p.15)

“The Decisive Moment”

From Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment (1952) in Goldberg 1981: Photography in Print:

“We work in unison with movement as though it were a presentiment of the way in which life itself unfolds. But inside movement there is one moment at which the elements in motion are in balance. Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it.

The photographer’s eye is perpetually evaluating. A photographer can bring coincidence of line simply by moving his head a fraction of a millimeter. He can modify perspectives by a slight bending of the knees. By placing the camera closer to or farther from the subject, he draws a detail — and it can be subordinated, or he can be tyrannized by it. [...]

Sometimes it happens that you stall, delay, wait for something to happen. Sometimes you have the feeling that here are all the makings of a picture — except for just one thing that seems to be missing. But what one thing? Perhaps someone suddenly walks into your range of view. You follow his progress through the view-finder. You wait and wait, and then finally you press the button — and you depart with the feeling (though you don’t know why) that you’ve really got something. Later, to substantiate this, you can take a print of this picture, trace on it the geometric figures which come up under analysis, and you’ll observe that, if the shutter was released at the decisive moment, you have instinctively fixed a geometric pattern without which the photograph would have been both formless and lifeless.

Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations…” (p. 385)

Photographic Meaning

From Allan Sekula: On the Invention of Photographic Meaning (1975) in Goldberg 1981: Photography in Print:

“The meaning of a photograph, like that of any other entity, is inevitably subject to cultural definition.” (p.452)

“Photographic ‘literacy’ is learned. And yet, in the real world, the image itself appears ‘natural’ and appropriate, appears to manifest an illusory independence from the matrix of suppositions that determines its readability. Nothing could be more natural than a newspaper photo, or, a man pulling a snapshot from his wallet saying, ‘This is my dog.’ Quite regularly, we are informed that the photograph ‘has its own language,’ is ‘beyond speech,’ is a message of ‘universal significance’ — in short, that photography is a universal and independent language or sign system. Implicit in this argument is the quasi-formalist notion that the photograph derives its semantic properties from conditions that reside within the image itself. But if we accept the fundamental premise that information is the outcome of a culturally determined relationship, then we can no longer ascribe an intrinsic or universal meaning to the photographic image.” (p.454)

“All photographic communication seems to take place within the conditions of a kind of binary folklore. That is, there is a ’symbolist’ folk-myth and a ‘realist’ folk myth. The misleading but popular form of this opposition is ‘art photography’ vs. ‘documentary photography.’ Every photograph tends, at any given moment of reading in any given context, toward one of these two poles of meaning. The oppositions between these two poles are as follows: photographer as seer vs. photographer as witness, photography as expression vs. photography as reportage, theories of imagination (and inner truth) vs. theories of empirical truth, affective value vs. informative value, and finally, metaphoric signification vs. metonymic signification.” (p.472)

“What Makes a Great Dance Photograph?”

These excerpts speak straight to my heart — or mind. If you don’t read the whole (admittedly lengthy) post, be sure to give the last three paragraphs (in black) a read.

From the foreword to Ewing 1987: The Fugitive Gesture:

“What makes a great dance photograph? To the balletomane, a great photograph shows a celebrated ballerina, in classic tutu, performing a flawless arabesque or in seemingly effortless flight, wearing an expression of otherworldly serenity; or, if a male dancer, in muscle-revealing tights and incredible elévation, the very essence of virility. ‘Such a picture’, writes dance photographer Anthony Crickmay, ‘is popular with editors and will . . . always find a public.’

When I began my search for the photographs in this book these were the pictures that balletomanes, dancers and professional dance photographers showed me with enthusiasm. I was more often than not disappointed. [... W]hy should a great dancer automatically make a great dance photograph any more than an exquisite Chanel ensemble automatically makes a great fashion photograph?

[...]

I could sympathize, of course. The dancer’s art is fugitive, leaving nothing of permanence except these fragments, a few hundredths of a second to represent an entire career. Can we blame a dancer for making great demands of them? Even fame cannot confer immortality; as great a name as George Balanchine recognized that photographs were all that would remain of his art in a hundred years.

[...]

But when it came to the expressive aspirations of photographers, [Edwin] Denby had nothing but scorn:

‘A dancer on stage doesn’t look strained and she isn’t a dry, amoeba-shaped blob, a configuration of swirls of cloth and rigid muscles and swollen veins fixed forever in a small square of nothing, like a specimen on a slide. The dancer isolated in the camera field seems to be hanging in a void, in a nowhere.’

And as for depicting movement, there was no sense even trying, for ‘the more painstaking {the movement}, the more pointless the effect. You don’t see the change in the movement, so you don’t see the rhythm, which is dancing.’

It would appear that critics are quite content with photography’s status as handmaiden to the dance. [...]

I believe dance photography to be more than opera glasses, more than a supply of icons, more than a diminished reflection of the dance. At its best it takes on an artistic life of its own; its four sides frame a tiny theatre, it is an independent medium subject to its own laws. Photography may serve the dance without being subservient. Thinking about this independence, I realized that dance photography, no less than dance, can be regarded as a language, with a vocabulary, grammar and syntax. What is more, a true appreciation is only possible within these terms. The iconic and documentary are among these terms, or functions, but by no means exhaust the expressive potential of the language. [...]

And so we return to our initial question: what is a great dance photograph? It seems to me that ultimately a dance photograph must be judged with the same standards as any photograph; that is, no special allowance can be made, no handicap given, for subject matter.

[...]

At some point well into my research I realized that the most dynamic pictures were generally created at the extremes of a continuum: either they were made in intense and sustained collaboration with a dancer or choreographer, or they were made without the dancer’s awareness. But the in-and-out service of the commercial studio photographer was unlikely to produce extraordinary results. As for in-performance pictures and those which resulted from ‘photo calls’, they were even less likely to result in impressive pictures. It is more likely to have been the fiercely independent spirits that have produced the most noteworthy work.” (p. 9–11)

Der (Miss-)Erfolg von Schwanensee — Petipa/Iwanow vs. Reisinger

Aus Schneider/Kieser 2006: Reclams Ballett Führer:

“Die Popularität von Schwanensee geht allerdings nicht auf Wenzel Reisinger Produktion [Uraufführung: 4. März 1877, Bolshoi-Theater, Moskau] zurück, sondern auf die Inszenierung, die Marius Petipa und Lew Iwanow knapp 20 Jahre später in Sankt Petersburg herausbrachten. Denn diese begründete die bis heute andauernde Aufführungstradition, die insbesondere die so genannten weissen Akte (der II. und IV. Akt) als Juwele klassischer Ballettkultur weitgehend original konservierte. Reisinger hingegen hatte eine nach den Massstäben der Zeit durchschnittlich erfolgreiche Choregorafie geschaffen, die sich, mit kleineren Veränderungen, bis 1883 im Repertoire des Bolshoi-Theaters hielt (1880 und 1882 stellte Reisingers Nachfolger Joseph Hansen überarbeietete Fassungen vor).” (S.415)

“Seit der Produktion von Petipa und Iwanow gehört Schwanensee zum festen Bestandteil des Repertoires; im Lauf des 20. Jahrhunderts prägte sich die Tendenz zu einer psychologisierten Handlung aus. II. und IV. Akt (Zählung gemäss der Uraufführung) werden dabei häufig in einer auf Iwanow basierenden Fassung aufgeführt, während I. und III. Akt in unterschiedlichem Umfang neu choreografiert werden. Bei jeder Neuchoreografie stellt sich zudem die Frage, welchen Ausgang die Geschichte nehmen soll: wie bei Reisinger, wie bei Petipa und Iwanow, oder ein Happy-End?” (S.417)

Tchaikovsky’s Thoughts on Swan Lake’s Visual World

From Thérèse Hurley: Opening the door to a fairy-tale world: Tchaikovsky’s ballet music in Kant 2007: Cambridge Companion to Ballet:

“Little evidence survives of the collaboration of Swan Lake’s choreographer Julius Reisinger and the composer; we cannot know how Tchaikovsky might have responded to any specific requests Reisinger made. We do know that the composer took a keen interest in more than just the musical aspects of the ballet’s first production. He was very specific about special effects, as machinist Karl Valts recalls:

‘Peter Ilyich gave special attention to the final act. In the storm scene, when the lake overflows its banks and floods the entire stage, a real whirlwind was built at Tchaikovsky’s insistence. Branches and twigs of trees were broken, fell into the water, and were carried away by the waves. After the storm, for the apotheosis, dawn came and the landscape was illuminated by the first rays of the rising sun at the curtain.’ [quoted from: Karl Federovich Valts: Shest'desyat pyat' let v teatre (Sixty-five Years in the Theatre), Leningrad 1928 (p.108). Translation in Roland John Wiley: Tchaikovsky's Ballets: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Nutcracker, Oxford 1985 (p.56)]

[...]

Clearly, Tchaikovsky had a vision of the way in which his ballet was to come to life – not just the music, but also the visual and sound effects on stage combined. And he was more interested in conveying the tumult and despair felt in the final scene than the immediate picture of swans in flight. When he chose to depict the swans, he did so very effectively.” (p.165)

“[...] Tchaikovsky was very conscientious in his use of instruments to simulate nature (harp arpeggios as waves), affect the plot (instrumentation used to deceive Siegfried [in Act III]) and add a touch of magic (harp cadenza and accompaniment in the love pas de deux). Yet the composer himself was not satisfied with his instrumentation for Swan Lake and according to Drigo ‘had intended to take up the matter, but he never managed to do this’ [quoted from: Wiley 1985: Tchaikovsky's Ballets (p.244)]. We can only speculate what changes Tchaikovsky himself would have made had he lived long enough to collaborate on the Petipa/Ivanov production.” (p.167)