When Natalie Portman won an Academy Award for her role as Nina, the prima ballerina in Black Swan, Dilya Rudenko, the managing director of the Russian State Ballet, was unmoved. “No, I have not seen this film,” she says. “I don’t like to see so much blood. In the ballet, there is not nearly so much blood. And my dancers are not crazy.”
Simon Walton, the impresario for the Russian State Ballet’s visit to the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin this week, was also unimpressed by the film. “It all seemed a bit far-fetched to me, and the dancing wouldn’t be as good as the Russian State Ballet company,” he says.
Swan Lake and Giselle will share the programme, and after the huge publicity accompanying the film, it surely cannot come as a surprise to learn the theatre has added two extra performances of Swan Lake — the ballet around which Darren Aronofsky’s movie revolves. “We knew Giselle would sell out, but we were surprised at the level of response for Swan Lake,” says Walton.
Black Swan, in which Portman brilliantly portrays a troubled soloist, depicts the world of ballet as being so neurotic and demanding it can crush a fragile spirit. Now, in a case of life imitating art, the Russian State Ballet’s guest prima ballerina is also called Nina. And Nina Kaptsova will be dancing both the title role in Giselle, and the parts of the swan queen and the black swan.
So how does the real-life Nina cope with the demands of ballet? “I have dreamt of dancing the role of the Swan Queen since I was a little girl,” she says in a further eerie echo of Portman’s character. “It [demands] not only impeccable technique, but also the gift of reincarnation through acting. I must dance both the swan queen and the black swan, and not every dancer can do that.”
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The fictional Nina couldn’t, but Walton has no doubt that the real one is well up to the task. “I saw Nina Kaptsova dance Giselle with the Bolshoi and at the end of the show there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. She was captivating,” he says. “Very few ballerinas I have seen have her acting ability.”
Based in Moscow, the Russian State Ballet’s full complement is 55 dancers, aged from 17 to 38, and with an average age of 25. As there is no school attached to the ballet, the dancers are head-hunted by Vyacheslav Gordeyev, the artistic director, who scours the country’s most prestigious competitions every year to find new talent. They also employ guest soloists; this year it is Kaptsova and Alexander Volchkov, both principal dancers with the Bolshoi. The company tours six months of the year. It was in China in December, and has just finished in Germany.
During the Soviet era, defections while on tour were notoriously common, but not any more. “Now that they are wanted in America, they want to stay in Russia,” says Rudenko. “When they were not wanted in America, all they wanted was to be in America. It’s funny the way it happens.”
Presumably the pay is far better now than it was during the Soviet regime, but Rudenko is reluctant to go into detail. “I tell you, they get enough,” she says. “There is no point in me giving you the figures because it would just not make sense to you.”
A typical day for the dancers begins with a ballet class at 11am, lasting about 90 minutes, followed by a 20-minute lunch break. Then there’s two hours of rehearsals, a short rest and the performance. Do the dancers enjoy touring? Rudenko thinks so. “They like the tours because they are young people — it is fun for them to see a new place,” she says. “I think they also like the tours because they get paid separately for every performance they do.”
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Russian ballet is a huge business, of course. According to Walton, there are “dozens of professional companies in Russia, [with] the Russian State Ballet certainly in the top five, along with the Bolshoi, Perm, Mariinsky and Stanislavsky”. He is taking a financial risk bringing the Russian State Ballet to Ireland in the middle of a downturn, particularly as the company was here for the opening of the Grand Canal Theatre only last spring. So, one full year of economic gloom later, how does this spring compare? “Overall, my costs have gone up. Not by much, but enough to notice,” he says.
The price of airfares to fly the company from Russia exceeds €35,000 (£30,000).
Accommodation is required for 12 technicians, six managers and 53 dancers. They’ll need to transport the company’s sets and costumes by truck, provide meals for everyone, and pay for the RTE National Symphony Orchestra and advertising. Almost all of these costs have to be recouped from ticket sales, although there is sponsorship from the car maker Jaguar. “I get friends saying to me, ‘With all these people in the audience, paying €40-€50 to see the show, you must make heaps,” Walton says. “It’s almost impossible for me to explain to them quite how difficult it can be just to break even.”
There are compensations, however. “I used to work as an impresario for rock’n’roll bands . . .,” he recalls. “People in ballet are just so much more professional and pleasant.” He first thought of promoting ballet when he was bringing rock groups to Russia. After being regularly invited to the ballet there, his love for the art form grew.
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Though ballet was once considered an elitist interest in this part of the world, he believes that is now changing — and, naturally, Black Swan has assisted that process. “The great thing about ballet nowadays is that you can get into a taxi anywhere in Dublin and ask the driver if they know Swan Lake and they will start humming the tune. I just love that,” Walton says.
In every production of Swan Lake, perhaps the most intriguing decision to be made by the artistic director is which ending to use: the tragic end of the swan queen, as originally written by Tchaikovsky, or a fairytale, happy-ever-after finale substituted after the composer’s death. Swan Lake was Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, premiered by the Bolshoi in Moscow in 1877. The complex rhythms of the original score were unlike anything the dancers had ever interpreted, and before the ballet was even performed, the producers were filleting Tchaikovsky’s music, replacing it with simpler dance tunes.
In Swan Lake’s first six years, it was performed 42 times, an unusually high number. Then it was taken out of repertoire — ostensibly because the scenery had disintegrated. This might have been the end of Swan Lake, were it not for the recasting of the conclusion into the generic happy ending that audiences still expect today.
Giselle, composed by Adolphe Adam, is a much older ballet that premiered at the Salle le Peletier in Paris in 1841. It tells the story of a peasant girl who dies young and whose ghost must protect her lover from a group of evil female spirits. As in Swan Lake, a young woman has been condemned to suffer. Perhaps these stories were partly inspired by the difficult lives of ballerinas, whom the composers would have known.
“Ballet is magic, fantastic but dangerous,” says Rudenko. There are strains to the bones, muscles, tendons and especially the feet. There is the mental tension that comes from finely tuned artists seeking physical perfection before a critical audience. To be at the top of their game, says Rudenko, dancers have to “not care for much else. They have friends in the company. Outside, I don’t know”.
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Top dancers spend so much of their childhoods under the strict regime of ballet schools, they can neglect to learn life skills. “If the tour director hasn’t organised every minute detail of the tour, on the day the dancers will simply forget their passports,” says Walton.
Another notorious area of conflict within ballet is the weight of the dancers, or more accurately, their lack of weight. “Nobody will talk about that,” Kaptsova says. “It is a personal matter how one complies with a certain standard for the stage. And it’s something that is very important to every artist.”
No one knows the truth about how Tchaikovsky died, but he may have been pressured into suicide. Was it this hidden reality that lead to his masterpiece being worked away from tragedy? Asked which of the two endings we will see in Dublin, Walton refuses to be drawn. “You just have to come and see the show,” he says.
The Russian State Ballet is performing two shows of Giselle and four shows of Swan Lake at the Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin, March 16-20. Bookings on 01 677 7770