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.

PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF...: Early on, I was convinced that Synetic Theater's adaptation of The Master and Margarita (showing at the Shakespeare Theater's Lansburgh through December 12, so go now!) would never work. Synetic, which typically does wordless dance/movement adaptations of classic texts, had two big things working against them: Their production has words, and takes place in front of an audience.

Both of these factors served to make the early parts of The Master feel really intensely unsubtle. Without the full context of Bulgakov's prose (which okay, I've only read in translation, but work with me here, people) and the privacy of one's own skull, the discussion of belief in God and the "seventh proof of God" (the Devil exists, therefore God must) felt heavy-handed.

However, by the end of the night I was once again completely on board with Synetic. Their total commitment to the portrayal of Soviet Moscow as a nightmare carnival probably had some personal resonance (much of the troop is made up of Georgian immigrants) and certainly had immense, sinister visual flair. They capture the novel's musical quality, in which motifs return and change key. They play up the Song of Songs aspect of Margarita's search for her Master, which I don't think I even noticed when I read the novel. And they hit hard on the Orwellian aspects of the novel, like the shifts in meaning of the final uses of the word "peace."

A really good, strongly horror-influenced, deeply Christian (or, more accurately, shaped around the space where Christianity would be) production. Recommended.

Oh life looked so rosy in the blogwatch,
But I'll be a friend and I'll tell you what's in store...

Belated Halloweenery edition.

Camassia on Synetic Theater's Dracula adaptation. I strongly second her belief that Synetic should've stayed wordless; the best moments of the production were all dance, from the snaky vampire women to the eerie invisible horse. (That horse really should NOT have worked--it should've evoked memories of Monty Python members banging coconuts--and yet the amazing lighting work and the actor's total commitment to the moment made his galloping seem terrifying, not silly.)

Dresden Codak: 42 Essential Third-Act Twists. FOOD STARTS EATING PEOPLE.

Pumpkin Gutter: This may be the most fabulous thing ever. Iron Pumpkin, embryo pumpkin, American Gothic pumpkin, braces pumpkin, scary eye pumpkin, tarantula pumpkin... there's something here for everyone (in the Addams Family). Sadly, I forget where I found this.

Sean Collins: Reviewing Al Columbia's Pim and Francie:

But moreover, these scary stories and disturbing images are all so gorgeously awful that they appear to have corrupted the book itself. They look like they've emerged from the ether, seared or stained themselves partly onto the pages, then burned out, or been extinguished when the nominal author shut his sketchbook and hurled it across the room or tore up the pages in terror.

MORE.

Plus, he reviews Paranormal Activity. While he ended up with a different overall stance on the movie than I did, I really liked a lot of his review, e.g.:

...For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren't flickering--something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would--only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.

But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just...stood there, for hours and hours. That's pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. ...These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They're purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone's doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable.

(whole thing--plus comments-boxing!)

Basically, the buzz around PA has made me really want to rewatch The Blair Witch Project--especially since I am in the minority who really liked the Heather character!--so that's probably good.

OUT AND ABOUT, LIKE A RORSCHACH BAT*: Here's where I'll be in the next few days. If your own itinerary looks similar, why not say hello?

Thursday: All-day conference at Heritage on "Religious Practice and the Family: What the Research Says." This is totally free, they feed you, and I should be able to get an article out of it... and, uh, it's also a fascinating subject!

Then, at night, I shall venture into darkest Rosslyn (it's actually about four blocks from the metro, but I am scared of suburbs) to see Synetic Theater's wordless adaptation of Dracula. I saw their Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this month, and it was amazing--funny, sexy, eerie, poignant, all conveyed solely through music and movement. I'd been hearing about this troupe, mostly made up of Georgian immigrants, for years; I can tell you it lives up to the hype. More once I've seen Dracula.

Friday: "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," at the American Film Institute Silver theater in Silver Spring. Again, a short (though uphill) walk from the metro. Scary movie with live music. I'll be at the 9.30 screening.

Saturday: Halloween!

Sunday: "Night Editor," AFI, 12.45 pm--tickets only $5! Noir, and I'm hoping the title indicates that there will be at least a bit of newspaper-noir, a subgenre I can never resist.

(Also, this is All Saints' Day, of course, so I will be churchifying.)

*Possibly the second-most obscure blog heading I've ever used. That Hattifatteners quote might still be the most obscure.