Swan Lake

Festival directors are always bringing overseas dance companies to Australia but invariably they choose contemporary dance, not classical ballet. This makes the arrival here of the mighty Paris Opera Ballet, the oldest ballet company in the world, so special.

It is simply the most virtuosic, awesome example of classical ballet I have ever seen.

Rudolf Nureyev choreographed this new version of Swan Lake soon after he took over the Paris Opera Ballet in 1983. The original ballet was always focused on the princess ballerina cursed to be an unloved swan. But ever since Nureyev leapt to fame as the Prince, that role and not the Swan has been the star of the ballet – with his moody psychological yearning for an ethereal love.

Deeper critics than I have written about Nureyev’s Prince seeking the unobtainable love of a swan as a way to avoid his latent homosexuality, and all the gorgeous male dancers in his court. Certainly the Paris Opera Ballet’s virile display of dancing manhood underlines this interpretation.

Matthew Bourne’s vivid version seen in Sydney last year, with boys as swans, made this gay theme of Swan Lake even more explicit. While purists felt Bourne’s storytelling upstaged the dancing, the balletic technique and impact of this production is unbeatable.

The real star is the corps de ballet. Their discipline and artful precision are instilled in these dancers from their first steps at the Paris school associated with this company for centuries. The smallest detail of phrasing is thus amplified like a wave across dozens of dancers.

And Nureyev’s choreography, although it often makes the solos like a circus line-up of acrobatic tricks, is for the corps de ballet joyously complex and dramatic. Here finally is classical ballet in which the discipline and often absurd conventions of the form unleash emotion rather than impede it.

Slender José Martinez as the Prince and Agnes Letestu as the vulnerable Swan bring astonishing freshness and detail to this old vocabulary. Of course, the glorious sweep of Tchaikovsky’s music also helps.

The production is sumptuously costumed with a late medieval flourish for the court, the men in tight embroidered jackets, the women swirling in pastel dresses. And Karl Paquette is sexy and enigmatic as both the Prince’s manipulative tutor and the evil Rothbart who so heartlessly controls the Swan.

Swan Lake is at the Capitol Theatre until Saturday. The Paris Opera Ballet then stages Balanchine’s Jewels until 30 June.

Review by Martin Portus