I SWAN TO MAN: Some thoughts on the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake, as viewed via Netflix.

First, I loved this. It had a lot of images I want to stow away in my mental Mombi gallery of heads. The look of this production is iconic for a reason! The opening dream sequence replaces the "bright boy called Death" with a mature swan/man, in a little boy's dreams--a really stunning, disturbing, enthralling image. Adulthood, aggression, masculinity, otherworldliness and the sublime are all offered as possible candidates for "the monster at the end of this book," all shifting and iridescently fluid, identified with one another and yet distinguishable.

The intense longing conveyed in the park/lake scenes was especially fine and poignant, and I loved the eye-patched woman in the final "society" scene. I've never seen a traditional Swan Lake, so I don't know to what extent matching the most iconic music to moments in which the lovers are parted or are yearning for one another is typical, but it was really amazing. The plangent, familiar music becomes eldritch when it expresses nightmare rather than dream, liminality rather than immersion.

I was strongly reminded of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Derek Jarman's Edward II. The "looks" of the two productions are similar. The faint hint of misogyny is common to both--though much more prominent in the Bourne show because he has so few roles for women. Both Jarman and Bourne don't present a madonna/whore dichotomy... more of a dictatrix/flapper dichotomy. (Did Margaret Thatcher really do so much psychological damage?) The roles for women in Bourne's Swan Lake are as follows: 1) Maria Motherissueskaya, 2) Ditzie Doritos, 3) Butterfly Ballerinas whose art is cheap and obvious (unlike the subtle work we're watching now!) and 4) Eyepatch of Awesome.

And the sense of thwarted erotic hunger is of course preeminent in both productions. Jarman's work is much better because he chooses to express anger rather than self-pity, and politics rather than pop-psychology. Nonetheless if you are glad you saw his EII you should probably see this show too.

Speaking of pop-psychology, this production was really swilling the cliché. The swans are coming from beneath the bed! He looks at his reflection and drinks from a flask to demonstrate his pain! I'm really conflicted about this, since a) ballet, like opera (like horror, like genre in general), is already stylized and so cliche is always imminent, and
b) I'm pretty sure I fell in love with figure skating in large part because it married actual artistry so completely with vaudeville tawdriness, sawdust and stardust. (Oh, why not, here's more Christopher Bowman.)

So if we're simply mining pop-psych for immediately compelling, intelligible hieroglyphics of melodrama, then I support that 106%. (Not just 100%, because I am beyond reason.) But the Bourne production seemed to me to swing occasionally into self-seriousness, an attempt at actually representing the inner consciousness of a conflicted gay prince, and this I found a bit Oprah-ish or insistent.

And so we return to our sheep (or our feathers)--there are so many sequences of this production which I found amazing. I loved the drunken staggering outside the bar. I loved the pursuing-retreating-captured dynamic after the ball.

But let me end by comparing this disc, unfairly, to two live performances.

First: I don't think I could have really understood this production before I became a fan of the Synetic Theater. Their provocative, intermittently tawdry, undeniably brilliant and idiosyncratic interpretations of classic works through dance helped me develop a modern-dance vocabulary. They were able to show me, as if teaching me sign language, how there is no one-to-one correspondence between dance and Shakespeare and yet a dance troupe can convey all the complexities and ornaments of Antony and Cleopatra. (This month their King Lear opens and I am LITERALLY JOE BIDEN bursting at the seams to see it!) Gestures aren't words, and yet a dance sequence can be a paragraph.

And second... a few days after I saw the Bourne Swan Lake via Netflix, I saw the Mariinsky Ballet (if you remember Reagan then you, like me, may know them best by their Soviet-era name, the Kirov Ballet) perform "Giselle."

Look, I know it's not fair to compare the Mariinsky to anyone. And yet the shocking precision of their movements--despite a radically silly storyline, despite sequences in which the ballerinas had to hop across the stage--the grace and the illusion of effortless gliding were simply unparalleled. They took us into another dimension, another kind of consciousness (I KNOW how foo-foo I sound! I can't think of any other way to put it!), simply through their razor-sharp control. Their technical prowess made them so alien that they didn't have to rely on their interpretation of the story for sublimity.

LORD GOD HAVE MERCY--ALL CRIMES ARE PAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIID!!!! On Saturday the Rattus and I went to New Britain, CT, to see the Hole in the Wall Theater's punk-themed production of Richard III. I was expecting cheap thrills, something a bit chintzy but still fun.

And sure, okay, some of the acting was wobbly. But mostly this was super extra awesome! And smart, too--there were genuine insights and smart choices here. I feel like I understand the play better now, plus it was so much fun that I almost exploded. I really wish I'd seen it earlier--we went to the very last performance. I'll definitely be checking out what this theater is doing the next time I'm in sunny New Haven.

So some thoughts: First, the punk theme isn't quite consistent or really very thematic at all! That's fine--I don't think a one-to-one, "everyone is corrupt and their level of punkosity signals their level of corruption" thing would work, nor would a more explicitly '70s Britain "winter of our discontent," nor would a "Richard III is the story of England going crazy" thing. Instead, the punk theme was basically an excuse for lots of hilarious and terrific visuals. I mean, if you don't love Richard of Gloucester spray-painting an anarchy sign on a wall, you basically hate freedom.

The Richard was fantastic: Nick Pollifrone, who trained at RADA. He's having an immense amount of fun, and he sells the various choices about when to yell and when to slink. The seduction of Anne is hard to mess up, but this guy was even able to handle the really clunky "Richard is Richard; that is, I am I" speech--he spends the first half of it reflexively sarcastic, self-lacerating and self-ignoring, and then slowly becomes completely unhinged.

The cross-gender casting was also really well done. Catesby (Amanda Ratti) was a groupie-ish girlfriend type, violent and lost; Ratcliffe (Katie Corbett) was a dead-eyed and intermittently thuggish blonde (throughout her first scene she did this terrific, drugged-out stare, with slow, mindless blinks every ten seconds or so); and Hastings (Barbara Gallow) was an older feline. All of Richard's minions captured the variety of motives you need to explain how he hung on to anybody after he started killing off his supporters. Buckingham (Ed Bernstein) is naively ambitious and a bit flighty; Hastings is overconfident in her own abilities, especially her ability to read other people; and Catesby and Ratcliffe are in it for fun, for a nihilistic, ecstatic anti-joy.

Richmond (Kenneth Semerato) was a sleek corporatist. Both he and Richard play their "rally the troops" speeches as rallying the audience, which I expect is a normal interpretation even though I don't recall ever having seen before, and which totally took advantage of the tiny theater space. The fight in which Richard is killed was furiously physical, and there's a nice, nice moment when Richmond limps away, echoing Richard's own limp. (Also, most of the Battle of Bosworth Field is scored to my actual favorite Sex Pistols song, "Sub * Mission," with some very cool choices in pairing action with song. In general the song choices here were absolutely stellar--Ratty pointed out that this was clearly a labor of love.)

The production notes were hilariously in the tank for the historical Richard. There was even an ad! YORKISTS 4EVA.

So yeah: I'm really just posting this to tell you to keep an eye out for Hole in the Wall if you're in the area. The Rat and I were surprised and thrilled.

VERY EXPENSIVE STONE. Sorry--as you can probably tell, the post below was unfinished. My computer crashed. I want to do a longer post looking at a bunch of Mangan's columns, because she's a vivid writer and a good opponent even where I disagree, but I don't have time right now. For some children's-book recommendations from me, you can go here, here, and (with caveat) here. Also, I don't think I mentioned the Bagthorpe books for some reason; read those too!

Meanwhile, 1) it's the feast of St. Justin Martyr, patron of philosophers!

and

2) I have very vague, and possibly false, memories of an article making the case that the Slits scene in Derek Jarman's Jubilee "elected Thatcher" (by being emblematic of the '70s glorification of public disorder, which isn't the only reading of Jubilee, but whatev). Did I dream this, or does someone else remember the article? I need it for a thing.