Swan Lake: a celebration of male love

Even those who have not yet seen Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake will have been hard pressed to escape the posters prominent in the tube throughout the noughties or else might have caught Adam Cooper’s brief appearance as the swan at the end of Billy Elliot. The production is now in its fifteenth year, making it the longest running ballet in both the West End and on Broadway, which is a tribute to the brilliance of Bourne’s choreography, design and eye to detail. What struck me the most when I watched it recently, for the third time, was how the dance has matured with time. Whether I had become more astute or whether Bourne has refined and developed the production, I could not say, yet I certainly understood much more what Bourne is getting at. The development of Swan Lake owes much to both Bourne’s later productions (in particular The Car Man and Dorian Grey) and to the triumphs of the Gay Rights Movement in the new millennium.

In Bourne's production the company of swans are, famously, entirely male. Heterosexual ballets are at once subverted into homosexual or homoerotic love affairs; for instance, the prince falling in love with a male swan. Whereas his later productions, The Car Man and Dorian Grey are more explicitly bisexual, Swan Lake remains a nuanced exploration of male beauty and love. The sensuality of the male swans consumes the stage; they at once exude both feminine grace and masculine strength. Importantly, the swans are not presented as the only road to beauty. The prince is not driven into the arms of a male lover because female beauty is absent; to do so would undermine the journey the prince takes throughout the ballet and the inevitability of his own disposition. Thus, on the street outside Swanks nightclub, where he could go home with any number of whores or glamour girls, the ghostly appearance of the swan behind him captures his imagination. Of course, the audience is prepared for this; we have already seen his lingering glance at the muscled physique of a nude statue and have seen the dangerous beauty of the swan which haunts his dream. Despite the presence of undeniably attractive female characters (the Queen, his mother and his escort cut feminine) the prince is destined to fall in love with a man.

Why did Bourne chose to use Swan Lake to explore these issues of male beauty and homosexual love? Firstly, Swan Lake is the archetypical hetro-normal ballet and by subverting it he subverts the entire canon of heterosexual ballet love stories. Yet there is also something more dangerous in his choice of adaptation. Arguably the traditional story of Swan Lake verges on bestiality, although conservative productions will go to great lengths to avoid this construal. Bourne, however, does not. The prince falls for the swan when he is in explicitly fowl-like form, a sign nearby ironically instructing ‘Do Not Feed the Swans’. Perhaps Bourne is suggesting that for the hetro-norms of the court, homosexuality is as dangerous and alien as bestiality. Both can only be realised under the blanket of darkness and both are equally repulsive to the societies' sensibilities. The prince’s love for the swan (later identified as the stranger) is what will lead to his eventual death: there is no place for it in civilised life.

beautiful or beasts?

As well as a celebration of male love Swan Lake also presents a challenge to the heterosexual norms. The ballet-in-a-ballet scene is one of the most extraordinary moments in the production. The royal party watch with the audience a brilliant parody of traditional ballet. The ballerinas float in dressed as fairies and butterflies pirouetting and tip-toeing round the stage, before the hero, dressed as a moustached Bavarian woodcutter, enters the scene and traps the heroine in his physical net. All is well until forest demons attempt to steal the heroine away, but fortunately the woodcutter slays them with his axe. The whole routine borders on the absurd. Yet the night I happened to see the ballet, the audience were not at all certain whether they were in on the joke. The slapstick antics of the trampy wannabe got far more laughs than the parody itself. Perhaps the audience felt the discomfort of Caliban in the glass.

The other dances worthy of discussion are those performed by the corps intermittently with the lovers’ dances at the end of the first act. The music usually lends itself to graceful dances, performed in traditional ballets by the female corps. Bourne’s swans are the antithesis of this. With feet kept square to the floor and body movements angular and ungainly, they are anything but graceful. And this is surely Bourne’s point; out of water swans are not graceful animals but waddling, inelegant fowl. The beautiful image of the swans floating by in the water which opens the scene is the counterpoint. The feathered trousers of the swans, Bourne’s trademark, emphasise the masculinity of the garment and yet when the swans turn, resemble the feathery tutus synonymous with traditional productions of Swan Lake. Yet again, the audience respond with laughter but, yet again, it is an uneasy laughter.

Bourne plays with the themes of male love and traditional hetro-normal ballet, but his approach is more ambitious than celebration and subversion. Complex psychological problems work their way into the dances. For instance, Bourne recognises the Freudian relationship between the gay man and his mother. In the first act, the prince has already given several jealous glances when his widowed mother shows favour to the young men of the court. But it is the party scene in which these issues have the most bearing. The distress it causes the prince when his lover dances and flirts with woman after woman is highly visible. The sense of jealousy and envy is palpable and yet the prince is able to maintain a facade of decorum. What pushes him over the edge is the union between his lover and his mother: the ultimate betrayal for the gay man. In true Oedipus–style it drives him mad and he turns the gun on his mother before being shot down by the figure of respectability and conformity. Bourne’s exploration of homosexuality goes much further than mere sexual desire.

The ambiguous portrayal of homosexual love comes to a climax in the final scene. The crucial question which I think Bourne asks is whether the prince’s love for the swan saves him or destroys him. On the one hand, the initial sight of the swan stops him committing suicide and gives him purpose in his life. Moreover, in the final disturbing bed scene, the swan vainly protects him against the barrage of other swans who all want a piece of the young prince. The masculine beauty of the swans on stage contrasts with the demonic shadows they cast on the well. It is his association with the swan and the deceitful workings of the stranger that bring about the prince’s death.

One gets the impression that nothing happens by accident in Bourne’s production. The ballet is almost literary; at one point a minor character taps his foot thrice demanding his escort get down from the table and the words ‘get down now’ are almost auditory. Indeed, Bourne’s first dance A Play without Words evokes the very paradox of a literary medium without the tools of literature. The subversions of Swan Lake are conscious decisions on Bourne’s part and allow him to explore male love. Whereas the clumsy and self-indulgent subversions of The Car Man and Dorian Grey (for instance the decision to make Henry Wooton female) have only the effect of shock; the way in which he subverts the norms in Swan Lake provides him with an excellent vehicle to explore complex issues which is why it remains technically the best and the most loved of Bourne’s productions.