Alastair Macaulay: This Swan Lake is a work in progress

From our ballect critic:

Georgian State Ballet Swan Lake 2024.viii.30

by Alastair Macaulay

The ballerina Nina Ananiashvili – a Georgian who starred with the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow and American Ballet Theatre and gave memorable guest performances with many other companies – had a glorious stage career before she became director of the State Ballet of Georgia, to which she has brought Western choreography by George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton and others. For two weeks (until September 8), her company has come to the London Coliseum with a Swan Lake that it’s easier to commend for what it isn’t than what it is. The credits claim that the choreography is by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov (not much of either, alas, but that’s par for the course in today’s Swan Lakes) as restaged by Alexey Fadeechev and Ananiashvili.

The dance historian and critic David Vaughan (1924-2017) liked to say “The worst Swan Lake is the one you are watching.” But that never applies to the Georgian State Swan Lake. Unlike Liam Scarlett’s wrong-headed production for the Royal Ballet, this is fittingly set in the Middle Ages, the Age of Chivalry to which this ballet’s spirit belongs, and doesn’t try to turn the story into a palace power struggle. Unlike Peter Wright’s characteristically misguided version for the Birmingham Royal Ballet or Rudolf Nureyev’s for the Paris Opera, it’s not an unstylish patchwork of different performing traditions and musical texts. Unlike Peter Martins’s staging for New York City Ballet, it’s not visually hideous: far from it.

Unlike Kevin McKenzie’s ridiculous treatment for American Ballet Theatre, it doesn’t imply that Odette is transformed into a swan because the sorcerer Rothbart is a closet bestialist, and it doesn’t short-change the audience by giving the ballerina too little dancing in the final act. Unlike Yuri Grigorovich’s re-hash for the Bolshoi Ballet, it doesn’t make the mistake of making the ballet about Prince Siegfried rather than about Odette, queen of the swans (listen to the music, Yuri) though it does make the blunder of making Rothbart a dance role.

It comes to London with four Odette-Odiles. I look forward to catching the first-cast Georgian ballerina Nino Samadashvili at tonight’s (Friday 30) performance. But my own first visit to it brought the young American prodigy Chloe Misseldine, a twenty-two-year-old American Ballet Theatre dancer who was immediately promoted to principal after her New York debut in the famous double role of Odette-Odile. Thursday’s was only her third performance in the role.

Wonderfully mysterious, beautifully long-limbed, and technically brilliant, she has a good stage face that, very compellingly, she mainly keeps mask-like. You hang on her every movement just to find out who she is; I loved the elements of pathos and vulnerability she subtly allowed to emerge during Odette’s great adagio with Siegfried. When, as Odile, she smiles, it’s just a fleeting sense of glee: she’s not one of those (all too many) Odiles who need to signal their evil or their triumph.

She was dancing for the first time with the tall, handsome, Finnish Michel Krčmář, she had one brief partnering mishap, but nothing broke her concentration. By the end, she had the audience in her spell, but I imagine she will be twice as good at later performances. He’s physically strong and expansive but, as yet, trite as an actor.

If Fadeechev and Ananiashvili were to restore Petipa’s first-scene pas de trois and Ivanov’s final lakeside scene, this production would be twice as good. The Georgians are engagingly spirited in the national dances of the ballroom, but as swan-maidens they’re too constrained: physically grand but polite. The male dancers have amplitude but land heavily from jumps. The women’s point shoes – beautifully elegant and without any of the heavy darning that so deforms the Royal Ballet’s feet – have distractingly percussive blocks. None of the acting has convincing detail: as Siegfried’s mother, the queen, Ina Azmaiparashvili, presents queenliness and motherhood in the same all-purpose key throughout. Although ballet in Tbilisi goes back to the nineteenth century, the State Ballet of Georgia is still a work in progress.