Kent Stowell’s Swan Lake re-opened for the 2024-25 season at Pacific Northwest Ballet on Friday, and it is as opulent as it is sublime.
The playfully grand Act I pas de trois can’t help but foreshadow the romantic and tragic pas de deux between Odette and Siegfried in Acts II and IV. In the titular pas de quatre, the low Reynolds number rotoring of the choreography swells with all of the PNB corps’ precision and intensity. And Act III’s ballroom scene national dances offer tableaux of movement so luxurious that conclude with Amanda Morgan’s hypnotizing performance as the Persian Dancer.
In these daytime scenes, the set is almost unnoticeable in its minimalism against Paul Tazewell’s bedazzling ballgown costumes. But with lighting by Randall G. Chiarelli, Ming Cho Lee’s illusory set is transformed completely at sundown. The gnarled branches that seemed to grow harmlessly over the marble columns gesturing at a castle at noon are sulky and darkling at midnight. And the ominously spherical moon never actually changes size but somehow seems to grow as it glows increasingly blood-orange with the latening of Act II and IV’s lakeside hours, as if in perpetual eclipse.
But the stage itself pales when Leta Biasucci steps out onto it as Odette in Act II, having rendered the iconically stylized swan port de bras with the essences of those emotions universal between human and prey-animal: fear and love, vulnerability and expressiveness. In every arabesque, her back arches like a sigh; beneath the white horizon of her white tutu, her steps seem like reflections on the lakewater, evoking at times the image of a swan reflecting Odette’s humanity, and at times the inverse, Odette moon-lit in the marshes, peering down to see instead of her sorrow and solitude only the swan reflected.
The iconic Odette/Odile dual lead role of Swan Lake is often described as one of the most technically and artistically demanding in all of classical ballet. But if Odile’s thirty-two fouettes are an incredible technical feat, the love story of Act II’s lakeside scene is an artistic one. In the scene, Prince Siegfried meets Odette while hunting in the forest with his friends, and she transforms from a swan and tells him about her curse, all while falling in love with him. She meets him as simultaneously as a swan meets a crossbow—and is afraid—and as a princess meets a prince—and is in love.
It takes more than swan-arms to portray that emotional complexity, but Biasucci uniquely embodies Odette like an exquisite corpse of yearning and heartbreak. As she floats over the stage, my eye catches, as if it were a flashing sequin, on the swanlike twitching of her winged foot to the stridulations of the violin, or the nervous preening represented by a little shaking of her head, a movement magical in the way it felt at once nearly-imperceptible and impossible not to miss. The tender embraces interspersed between Odette and the Prince’s cat-and-mouse flirtations can easily come off as unbelievable or jarring, but didn’t on Friday night; instead, I felt I was witnessing something about the way love exposes them in its protection, how it holds them in its freedom.
Enchanting as Biasucci’s prey-animal Odette is, I was already long under Swan Lake’s spell; I had been since the first floral port de bras of the six courtiers at Act I’s party, their swishing gowns like hibiscus flowers courtiers among whom the Prince, danced by Lucien Postlewaite, was meant to find a bride–if only he weren’t so disillusioned by their serenades. But although Kent Stowell’s interpretation is traditional in that takes no unusual creative liberties, it does include the left-out character of the Jester, who foils Siegfried’s overserious demeanor.
Silliness further takes the spotlight when his tutor Wolfgang, gets too drunk. Soloist Ezra Thomson performs fouettés off-balance and even dances in a pas de trois with the courtiers, although it’s suspect that he takes their hands more to keep himself standing than to dance; his exaggeratedly drunken wobbling and lurching renditions of the choreography are hilarious. When he spins out of control to crash his way offstage for good, its clear that only Wolfgang’s world is spinning, as Thomson remains the technically adept puppeteer: ballet technique demands correct posture because its the most functional way to move, not just because it looks graceful. Going without it as Thomson does for this role is a feat of its own right as much as its also very funny.
Swan Lake has almost as many endings as it does versions. The original Moscow production was claustrophobic with narrative and more fantasy than tragedy, featuring additional characters, enchanted objects, and an ultimate triumph over the evil sorcerer Rothbart and a happy ending. Since then, others have ended more sacrificially or idealistically, with Odette and the Prince dying in the lake together and reunited in the afterlife.
In this version, the tragedy is relocated from Rothbart’s fantastical curse to the Prince’s terrible but unmistakably human mistake when he promises himself to Odile. Odette forgives him, but there is nothing that can be done now to break her curse, and she is doomed to live as a swan forever. The Prince clutches himself, falls to the ground in anguish, then disappears in search of Rothbart to beg for a redemption he will not receive.
Rather than playing the black swan as a feminine copy of her father’s diabolical villainy, Biasucci’s Odile is as utterly convincing to audiences of the delight she takes in her impersonation as her trickery is convincing to Siegfried. Her swan arms are a mocking caricature of Odette’s hyperrealism, and her smile, which we expect only to be seductive and duplicitous, is at times almost exultant. She is not merely the Jungian shadow of Odette, or a tool of Rothbart. She is here to show off, and she does: Biasucci throws multiple triple pirouettes into the beginning of the thirty-two fouetté sequence of the coda with the ease of a swan trying to keep herself from flying away. Her artistic strength, in this role, is as Odette, but that strength also lends itself to a more dimensional performance as Odile. Tempting even the audience to fall for the ruse, this Odile is powerful and virtuosic, and Postlewaite’s Siegfried is completely gone on her.
The tragedy of Kent Stowell’s Swan Lake is felt clearly. It is not in heartbreak and loss, or the double-sacrifice of star-crossed lovers, as other versions emphasize, but in the Prince’s own realization of his single irreversible mistake, one so grand and yet so impossibly easy to make that it trespasses even the powers of Odette’s forgiveness. But in those fragile duskwards hours where love is a spell of its own, twenty-four girls cursed to be swans and a heartbroken Odette linger, always, in the air just a moment too long, untouchable as dreams.
Tickets: Swan Lake is on for one more weekend this February 8—11, with shows at 7:30 pm every night and 1:00 pm matinees on Saturday and Sunday. Buy tickets here: https://order.pnb.org/events?k=rep3.
Transportation: Take the Light Rail to Downtown Seattle and Monorail or Park at McCaw Hall—Follow GPS directions to McCaw Hall and the entrance to the attached garage is on the right across from the theater ($30).