United Kingdom The State Ballet of Georgia’s Swan Lake: Dancers of the State Ballet of Georgia, Orchestra of English National Opera / Papuna Gvaberidze (conductor). London Coliseum, 28.8.2024. (JO’D)
Production:
Music – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Choreography – Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov with restaging by Alexey Fadeechev and Nina Ananiashvili
Sets and Costumes – Vyacheslav Okunev
Lighting designer – Steen Bjarke
Cast (included):
Odette/Odile – Nino Samadashvili
Prince Siegfried – Oleg Ligai
Baron von Rothbart – Marcelo Soares
Benno, Siegfried’s Friend – Efe Burak
The Queen – Ina Azmaiparashvili
During the triumphant curtain calls on the opening night of the State Ballet of Georgia’s exceptionally coherent Swan Lake conductor, Papuna Gvaberidze, was handed a single, red rose. Moving to the front of the stage, Gvaberidze threw the rose to the musicians in the pit. Under his brisk baton, the orchestra of English National Opera had made Tchaikovsky’s score, from overture to conclusion, almost the main protagonist of the evening.
The richness of the music was reflected in Vyacheslav Okunev’s backdrops, sets, and costumes: quantities of overarching trees, in full leaf, for the park in front of the royal palace; trees that are bare for the moonlit scene by the lake; a ballroom of green and gold. Okunev’s costumes, against these painterly backgrounds, were of all, carefully chosen colours, with clever touches of white for the ball.
From the opening scene onwards the company as a whole gave the impression of tall dancers with graceful arms that moved in unison. At an individual level, Oleg Ligai as Prince Siegfried was tall and graceful, too, his port de bras expansive. Nino Samadashvili was equally convincing as the mournful Odette and the hard-bitten Odile. A single movement of her head in response to the music, at the end of the first scene by the lake, seemed to express all of Odette’s sadness. As Odile at the ball, in between her sarcastic reprise of Odette’s plaintive movements in the previous scene, she looked out at the audience with cynical eyes.
Before he encounters Odette, in this production, Prince Siegfried comes face to face with Baron von Rothbart (Marcelo Soares). A Baron von Rothbart who is, in some ways, a mirror image of the prince himself. This establishes a relationship between the two men, to which what happens between Siegfried and Odette might even be collateral. Is his raising of her into the air over von Rothbart’s head, at the climax of the final scene, really an assertion of Siegfried’s heterosexuality?
The State Ballet of Georgia’s Artistic Director, Nina Ananiashvili, was a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre for over twenty years. This production, which she in part restages, may be in the tradition of that company. The swans who surround Odette are far more impassive than they are in the Swan Lake of English National Ballet, for example. Making their entrance at one point like the Shades in La Bayadère, but on a level, they remain always distant. Especially so, somehow, in the Dance of the Cygnets (Tomone Kagawa, Ana Ksovreli, Sesili Guguchia, Tatia Isakadze).
The Bolshoi tradition may also explain why Nino Samadashvili, as Odile, steps out of her role and the narrative to receive applause, at length, for the glittering virtuosity of her dance. But she steps back into both for the final act. Despite these interruptions, and some awkwardness in the scene changes (though it is not production’s fault if people will talk over Tchaikovsky’s most poignant music), the overall impression of the State Ballet of Georgia’s Swan Lake is of dancers who speak the language of ballet with consummate fluency and eloquence.
John O’Dwyer