I went to see Swan Lake for the umpteenth time this past weekend in New York City. I went to see the two-act version choreographed by Peter Martins after Marius Petipa, Lev Ivanov, and George Balanchine. It was performed by The New York City Ballet, with Mira Nadon in the lead role as Odette/Odile.
There are a lot of bad things happening in the world right now. The hackers, snake-oil salesmen, misleaders, fraudsters, and genocidal maniacs are using the tools of human innovation for personal gain, death, and destruction. University arts and humanities departments are being discredited, dis-funded, and disbanded. Ballet is heralded by some as “the” dance form upon which all others are based and derided by others for originating in Western European courts and promulgating elitist, racist, and unrealistic values and aesthetics. I’m not going to defend or champion any of these claims here but am just providing the cultural context for my ballet-going.
I went to see Swan Lake with my mother. She reads Henry James (he is her “Henry”). She reads Rilke poetry in both English and German. Her Radcliffe book club is comprised of former professors and scholars. She writes handwritten letters. She makes coffee in a percolator on the stove. She washes dishes by hand. She spent her entire adult career as an internist at Montefiore/North Central Bronx Hospital helping patient populations from all over the world. She brought her ballet-loving daughter to all the ballet classes she and my father could afford (and even some they could not) and she fretted and toiled during all the ups and downs of my ballet life. She now takes Ballet for the Older Body at the Y and has learned Cecchetti porte bras. This is the cultural context of my mother.
I went to Swan Lake within these contexts as well as with a hope that the sharp stab of pain and loss that I used to feel while watching ballet would be gone. I expected Swan Lake, this vestige of a day and life past, a world and culture gone by, the primary choreographer already “cancelled” during the Me Too movement, to evoke at best a mere “eh – yes, I remember that step. And that one.”
But then the white swan fluttered, so bent backwards deeply and with exquisite control and abandon threw herself to the floor to be caught at the last moment by her prince. The violins and cellos supported her too. And I cried. So did my mother. Mira Nadon’s dying swan reached out through the history, through the years, from Imperial Ballet Russia, through 1950s and 1990s New York City, thousands of steps up into the 4th Circle of the David Koch Theatre of the Met, and held my still-beating heart in her white, sinewy hand.
My mother turned to me afterwards, her eyes and face shining. “I now have TWO great Swan Lakes with you to keep forever in my memory,” she said. “The first one with you, when you were six, and today’s.” I am glad I was there with my mother both times for that, too. I will comfort myself with these memories someday when she is gone.
Beyond this, though, even beyond this, is something that seems to be true in a way that I cannot quite comprehend. The Dying Swan is not a memory, remnant or vestige of a dying age, life, or world. She glides, she soars, she suffers, and she lives. Both onstage for the world to see and within me.