As a child, I was fond of bad ballet stories that featured troupes of plucky dancers, led by Russian impresarios with names such as Pullskov or Pushkov, and starring a charismatic prima ballerina who wore furs and flounced around the regions while churning out endless performances of a bowdlerised Swan Lake to warm the hearts of the culture-starved.
I hadn’t thought of those novels in years, until I found myself watching the Irina Kolesnikova season at the Coliseum this week. Kolesnikova is the prima ballerina of the St Petersburg Ballet Theatre, a company founded and funded by her husband, Konstantin Tachkin. She joined as a soloist in 1998, straight out of the Vaganova Academy, and by 2001 had become the company’s prima ballerina at only 21. She dances the lead in most performances, supported by distinguished guests from other companies. In this short London season (La Bayadère followed), these include the Bolshoi’s Denis Rodkin, the Royal Ballet’s Vadim Muntagirov and the Mariinsky’s Kimin Kim.
Because it receives no form of subsidy, the company survives by endlessly touring the most popular classics. And none pleases audiences more than Swan Lake. Yet people who paid good money for their seats witness a production that is, at best, an approximation of a great ballet; a sketch in blodgy oils, not a finely wrought masterpiece.
Swan Lake has attained its pre-eminence in the balletic firmament thanks to a Tchaikovsky score of haunting beauty and a story that pivots on an inexhaustibly interesting series of dualities: love and duty, good and evil, black and white. On the face of it, it might be a tale of a prince who doesn’t know what to do with his life, then blows his big chance by being unable to distinguish between the good enchanted white swan and her wicked black doppelgänger, but the poetry of its telling by Petipa and Ivanov transmutes the tale into an archetype of profound power.
Not here, alas. The dancers go through the motions in Yuri Gumba’s workmanlike 1996 staging, but meaning is absent. This is partly a matter of resources. The orchestra is tiny and subject to difficult variations of tempi, and the dancing is similarly stretched. Although the settings are chocolate-box pretty, they always look underpopulated; the company is so short of soloists that familiar figures reappear as peasants, swans and visiting princesses in rapid succession. They deserve medals for effort, but a certain exhaustion sets in. The corps de ballet is dutiful and mainly neat, rather than magical or polished. No one ever seems to be at full stretch.
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This is particularly true of the men, who look decidedly sluggish apart from Sergei Fedorkov’s Jester, who overcompensates for the torpor around him with sharp dancing and heavy mugging. Dmitry Akulinin’s Rothbart looks more like a nightclub bouncer than a terrifying sorcerer, and dances with about as much finesse. His death, apparently due to a costume malfunction, is the evening’s low point.
Rodkin, who has just been promoted to Bolshoi principal, undoubtedly adds a touch of class. He has an airy jump and an elegant presence. His acting may lack fervour — he wanders off in search of swans, rather than running headlong to his destiny — but he at least has gravitas and belief.
About the evening’s star, I have more reservations. Kolesnikova is undoubtedly striking, with a long, shapely torso and a pliable back. But somewhere in the course of many performances, her Odette has lost focus. She dances for her fans, not with her partner. However much she wreathes her man in her flexible arms, never for one moment does she make you believe in the character she is playing. Her Odile is flashy and technically strong, but equally mannered.
Does any of this matter if people are having a good time? Well, a production as thin as this cheats the audience of the possibility of experiencing the emotional heft that Swan Lake can offer. It’s a hollow travesty, not the rich real thing, and it’s hard not to feel angry at the spectacle.